Several NLP studies address the problem of figurative language, but among non-literal phenomena, they have neglected exaggeration. This paper presents a first computational approach to this figure of speech. We explore the possibility to automatically detect exaggerated sentences. First, we introduce HYPO, a corpus containing overstatements (or hyperboles) collected on the web and validated via crowdsourcing. Then, we evaluate a number of models trained on HYPO, and bring evidence that the task of hyperbole identification can be successfully performed based on a small set of semantic features.

Musical parody, i.e. the act of changing the lyrics of an existing and very well-known song, is a commonly used technique for creating catchy advertising tunes and for mocking people or events. Here we describe a system for automatically producing a musical parody, starting from a corpus of songs. The system can automatically identify characterizing words and concepts related to a novel text, which are taken from the daily news. These concepts are then used as seeds to appropriately replace part of the original lyrics of a song, using metrical, rhyming and lexical constraints. Finally, the parody can be sung with a singing speech synthesizer, with no intervention from the user.

Proverbs are commonly metaphoric in nature and the mapping across domains is commonly established in proverbs. The abundance of proverbs in terms of metaphors makes them an extremely valuable linguistic resource since they can be utilized as a gold standard for various metaphor related linguistic tasks such as metaphor identification or interpretation. Besides, a collection of proverbs fromvarious languages annotated with metaphors would also be essential for social scientists to explore the cultural differences betweenthose languages. In this paper, we introduce PROMETHEUS, a dataset consisting of English proverbs and their equivalents in Italian.In addition to the word-level metaphor annotations for each proverb, PROMETHEUS contains other types of information such as the metaphoricity degree of the overall proverb, its meaning, the century that it was first recorded in and a pair of subjective questions responded by the annotators. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first multi-lingual and open-domain corpus of proverbs annotated with word-level metaphors.

The name of a company or a brand is the key element to a successful business. A good name is able to state the area of competition and communicate the promise given to customers by evoking semantic associations. Although various resources provide distinct tips for inventing creative names, little research was carried out to investigate the linguistic aspects behind the naming mechanism. Besides, there might be latent methods that copywriters unconsciously use. In this paper, we describe the annotation task that we have conducted on a dataset of creative names collected from various resources to create a gold standard for linguistic creativity in naming. Based on the annotations, we compile common and latent methods of naming and explore the correlations among linguistic devices, provoked effects and business domains. This resource represents a starting point for a corpus based approach to explore the art of naming.