VOLIMET: A Parallel Corpus of Literal and Metaphorical Verb-Object Pairs for English–German and English–French
Prisca Piccirilli, Alexander Fraser, Sabine Schulte im Walde
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.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.starsem-1.18
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 13th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2024)
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Mexico City, Mexico
- Editors:
- Danushka Bollegala, Vered Shwartz
- Venue:
- *SEM
- SIG:
- SIGLEX
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 222–237
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.starsem-1.18
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Prisca Piccirilli, Alexander Fraser, and Sabine Schulte im Walde. 2024. VOLIMET: A Parallel Corpus of Literal and Metaphorical Verb-Object Pairs for English–German and English–French. In Proceedings of the 13th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2024), pages 222–237, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- VOLIMET: A Parallel Corpus of Literal and Metaphorical Verb-Object Pairs for English–German and English–French (Piccirilli et al., *SEM 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/jeptaln-2024-ingestion/2024.starsem-1.18.pdf