Synaesthesia is a type of metaphor associating linguistic expressions that refer to two different sensory modalities. Previous studies, based on the analysis of poetic texts, have shown that synaesthetic transfers tend to go from the lower toward the higher senses (e.g., sweet music vs. musical sweetness). In non-literary language synaesthesia is rare, and finding a sufficient number of examples manually would be too time-consuming. In order to verify whether the directionality also holds for conventional synaesthesia found in non-literary texts, an automatic procedure for the identification of instances of synaesthesia is therefore highly desirable. In this paper, we first focus on the preliminary step of this procedure, that is, the creation of a controlled lexicon of perception. Next, we present the results of a small pilot study that applies the extraction procedure to English and Italian corpus data.
@InProceedings{STRIKLIEVERS16.225,
author = {Francesca Strik Lievers and Chu-Ren Huang}, title = {A lexicon of perception for the identification of synaesthetic metaphors in corpora}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016)}, year = {2016}, month = {may}, date = {23-28}, location = {Portorož, Slovenia}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Marko Grobelnik and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Helene Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, address = {Paris, France}, isbn = {978-2-9517408-9-1}, language = {english} }
Summary of the paper