Judith Rietjens


2024

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Medical-FLAVORS: A Figurative Language and Vocabulary Open Repository for Spanish in the Medical Domain
Lucia Pitarch | Emma Angles-Herrero | Yufeng Liu | Daisy Monika Lal | Jorge Gracia | Paul Rayson | Judith Rietjens
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Patient-Oriented Language Processing (CL4Health) @ LREC-COLING 2024

Metaphors shape the way we think by enabling the expression of one concept in terms of another one. For instance, cancer can be understood as a place from which one can go in and out, as a journey that one can traverse, or as a battle. Giving patients awareness of the way they refer to cancer and different narratives in which they can reframe it has been proven to be a key aspect when experiencing the disease. In this work, we propose a preliminary identification and representation of Spanish cancer metaphors using MIP (Metaphor Identification Procedure) and MetaNet. The created resource is the first openly available dataset for medical metaphors in Spanish. Thus, in the future, we expect to use it as the gold standard in automatic metaphor processing tasks, which will also serve to further populate the resource and understand how cancer is experienced and narrated.