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Mapping Liberty Metaphors across Cultures and Time

Summary

Studies of how liberty is framed have mostly relied on philosophy, interviews or close reading. These methods offer depth but cannot follow patterns across centuries or countries. Suen et al. propose a scalable, corpus-based alternative grounded in Conceptual Metaphor Theory. They built a keyword inventory covering seven liberty themes, from bodily autonomy and free expression to colonialism and digital rights, and used it to pull matching sentences from COHA (American English, 1820s–2010) and a sample of the NOW news corpus spanning 20 countries. After cleaning, the MetaPro framework labeled each sentence with target–source concept mappings. The authors then examined the results in three ways: embedding plots and frequency counts, decade-by-decade line graphs for COHA, and country-by-metaphor heatmaps for NOW, supported by example phrases. They conclude that the distribution of metaphors, and how it shifts, can serve as an empirical signal of changing concerns in liberty discourse. The work shows how computational methods can support cultural analysis at large scale.

Key points

  • Data: The study used the complete COHA corpus. From NOW it used a sample of about 215 million words (2010–2024), plus 2025 material retrieved manually through keyword searches.

  • Keywords: The inventory has three types: global terms (e.g., liberty, freedom, rights), theme-specific "hooks", and "antonyms" marking constraint or domination (e.g., censorship, tyranny).

  • Preprocessing: Sentences were split with NLTK sent_tokenize, filtered by regex, and deduplicated. A blacklist removed false positives such as Marvel characters, video games, sports and corporate boilerplate.

  • Metaphor annotation: MetaPro uses WordNet and is reported to beat LLMs on metaphor tasks. It generates mappings such as LABOR IS SUBJUGATION from the word "bondage".

  • Scale:

    CorpusSentencesTotal mappingsDistinct mappingsMappings per sentenceOccurrence rate
    COHA240,093173,79615,6051.380.519
    NOW171,658136,30611,5201.260.529

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/4dzoudvxnqwm

@inproceedings{suen2026mapping,
  title = {{Mapping Liberty Metaphors across Cultures and Time}},
  author = {Suen, Sidney and Mao, Rui and Kwok, Kenneth and Cambria, Erik},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/4dzoudvxnqwm},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/4dzoudvxnqwm}
}

References

28 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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