“A Buster Keaton of Linguistics”: First Automated Approaches for the Extraction of Vossian Antonomasia

Michel Schwab, Robert Jäschke, Frank Fischer, Jannik Strötgen

Abstract
Attributing a particular property to a person by naming another person, who is typically wellknown for the respective property, is called a Vossian Antonomasia (VA). This subtpye of metonymy, which overlaps with metaphor, has a specific syntax and is especially frequent in journalistic texts. While identifying Vossian Antonomasia is of particular interest in the study of stylistics, it is also a source of errors in relation and fact extraction as an explicitly mentioned entity occurs only metaphorically and should not be associated with respective contexts. Despite rather simple syntactic variations, the automatic extraction of VA was never addressed as yet since it requires a deeper semantic understanding of mentioned entities and underlying relations. In this paper, we propose a first method for the extraction of VAs that works completely automatically. Our approaches use named entity recognition, distant supervision based on Wikidata, and a bi-directional LSTM for postprocessing. The evaluation on 1.8 million articles of the New York Times corpus shows that our approach significantly outperforms the only existing semi-automatic approach for VA identification by more than 30 percentage points in precision.
Anthology ID:
D19-1647
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6238–6243
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1647
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1647
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Michel Schwab, Robert Jäschke, Frank Fischer, and Jannik Strötgen. 2019. “A Buster Keaton of Linguistics”: First Automated Approaches for the Extraction of Vossian Antonomasia. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 6238–6243, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
“A Buster Keaton of Linguistics”: First Automated Approaches for the Extraction of Vossian Antonomasia (Schwab et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/D19-1647.pdf
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