Discovering Conceptual Metaphors using Source Domain Spaces

This article makes two contributions towards the use of lexical resources and corpora; specifically making use of them for gaining access to and using word associations. The direct application of our approach is for detecting linguistic and conceptual metaphors automatically in text. We describe our method of building conceptual spaces, that is, defining the vocabulary that characterizes a Source Domain (e.g., Disease) of a conceptual metaphor (e.g., Poverty is a Disease). We also describe how these conceptual spaces are used to group linguistic metaphors into conceptual metaphors. Our method works in multiple languages, including English, Spanish, Russian and Farsi. We provide details of how our method can be evaluated and evaluation results that show satisfactory performance across all languages.