The present study is focused on the automatic identification and description of frozen similes in British and French novels written between the 19 century and the beginning of the 20 century. Two main patterns of frozen similes were considered: adjectival ground + simile marker + nominal vehicle (e.g. happy as a lark) and eventuality + simile marker + nominal vehicle (e.g. sleep like a top). Al...

Similes are natural language expressions used to compare unlikely things, where the comparison is not taken literally. They are often used in everyday communication and are an important part of cultural heritage. Having an up-to-date corpus of similes is challenging, as they are constantly coined and/or adapted to the contemporary times. In this paper we present a methodology for semi-automated...

What is the relation between metaphors and similes? Aristotle's "comparison theory" holds that metaphors are elliptical similes: "Sam is a pig" is simply a short form of "Sam is like a pig." In contrast, it has been suggested that metaphors cannot be elliptical similes because metaphors are "stronger" than similes. We know metaphors are stronger, it is argued, because of examples involving corr...

Many figurative expressions are fully conventionalized in everyday speech. Regarding the neural basis of figurative language processing, research has predominantly focused on metaphoric expressions in minimal semantic context. It remains unclear in how far metaphoric expressions during continuous text comprehension activate similar neural networks as isolated metaphors. We therefore investigate...

A simile is a comparison between two essentially unlike things, such as “Jane swims like a dolphin”. Similes often express a positive or negative sentiment toward something, but recognizing the polarity of a simile can depend heavily on world knowledge. For example, “memory like an elephant” is positive, but “memory like a sieve” is negative. Our research explores methods to recognize the polar...

People rarely articulate explicitly what a native speaker of a language is already assumed to know. So to acquire the stereotypical knowledge that underpins much of what is said in a given culture, one must look to what is implied by language rather than what is overtly stated. Similes are a convenient vehicle for this kind of knowledge, insofar as they mark out the most salient aspects of the ...

We searched the Internet for expressions linking topics, such as crime, and vehicles, such as disease, as similes (crime is like a disease) and as metaphors (crime is a disease). We counted the number of times the expressions were accompanied by explanations (crime is like a disease because it spreads by direct personal influence). Similes were more likely than metaphors to be accompanied by ex...

Are there possible benefits to be gained from emulating the human way (of thought and language) with a machine way? This article outlines the concepts of similes and metaphors. This article aims to emphasise that similes and metaphors can be utilised to help understand and extract useful information from spatial data. As similes and metaphors are utilised in human language and understandings it...

Similes are figures of speech in which the similarities as well as the differences between two or more semantically unrelated entities are expressed by means of a linguistic unit. This unit, also called marker, can either be a morpheme, a word or a phrase. Since similes rely on comparison, they occur in several languages of the world. Depending on the marker used and of the semantic or structur...