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VOLIMET: A Parallel Corpus of Literal and Metaphorical Verb-Object Pairs for English–German and English–French

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Alexander Fraser

Prof. Dr.

Principal Investigator

Abstract

The interplay of cultural and linguistic elements that characterizes metaphorical language poses a substantial challenge for both human comprehension and machine processing. This challenge goes beyond monolingual settings and becomes particularly complex in translation, even more so in automatic translation. We present VOLIMET, a corpus of 2,916 parallel sentences containing gold standard alignments of metaphorical verb-object pairs and their literal paraphrases, e.g., tackle/address question, from English to German and French. On the one hand, the parallel nature of our corpus enables us to explore monolingual patterns for metaphorical vs. literal uses in English. On the other hand, we investigate different aspects of cross-lingual translations into German and French and the extent to which metaphoricity and literalness in the source language are transferred to the target languages. Monolingually, our findings reveal clear preferences in using metaphorical or literal uses of verb-object pairs. Cross-lingually, we observe a rich variability in translations as well as different behaviors for our two target languages.

inproceedings


*SEM 2024

13th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics co-located with NAACL 2024. Mexico City, Mexico, Jun 20-21, 2024.

Authors

P. Piccirilli • A. Fraser • S. Schulte im Walde

Links

DOI

Research Area

 B2 | Natural Language Processing

BibTeXKey: PFS24

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