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VUPMC: A New Political Metaphor Corpus in Mandarin Chinese

Summary

Most metaphor annotation work, including datasets used in NLP, only separates literal from metaphorical usage. Mandarin has no transparent, reproducible way to tell conventional metaphors from novel ones, and existing Chinese creative-metaphor data depend on crowdworkers and cover only narrow constructions. The author addresses this with CNMIP, a dictionary-driven protocol that builds on MIPVU and on Lu and Wang's (2017) Mandarin adaptation. She then uses it to build VUPMC, a manually annotated corpus of Chinese government discourse about trade. Three native-speaker metaphor specialists coded concordance lines around 贸易 'trade' from policy documents, foreign-ministry press remarks and official news. Roughly 6.64% of lexical units were metaphor-related words, such as war vocabulary that frames trade as conflict. Their distribution differs significantly by genre and part of speech. Overlaps with VUAMC and LCMC support the procedure's reliability. The differences reflect both the finer conventional/novel distinction and features specific to Chinese political registers. The corpus is intended as training and evaluation data for detecting Chinese conventional and novel metaphors.

Key points

  • Source data: The raw material is 1,907 trade-related articles from 2017–2021 in the Renmin (People's Daily) government database, totalling 3,235,258 words. The annotated concordance subset has 220,895 tokens.
  • Genres: There are three genres: Policy Documents (e.g., Government Work Reports), News Reports (People's Daily, leaders' activities) and Remarks (Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokespersons). These are positioned as counterparts to the academic, news and spoken registers of VUAMC.
  • Preprocessing: Word segmentation was done with Sketch Engine. POS tagging used the Stanford Log-linear POS Tagger with the Chinese Penn Treebank tagset.
  • Sense decisions: Basic and contextual senses were determined with the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (CCD) and zdic.net (DC). For idioms and expressions missing from those dictionaries, the annotators used the Idiom Encyclopedia (IE, 90,000+ entries) and Baidu Baike (BB).
  • Results and release: 6.64% of lexical units are MRWs, with significant variation across genres and POS. The dataset is released on GitHub (Tansjoukje/The-VUPMC-dataset).

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

Topics: Part-of-speech tagging

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/5exd4mc9kh4d

@inproceedings{tan2026vupmc,
  title = {{VUPMC: A New Political Metaphor Corpus in Mandarin Chinese}},
  author = {Tan, Xiaojuan},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/5exd4mc9kh4d},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/5exd4mc9kh4d}
}

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