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Figurative, Polysemous, Conventional: Designing a Dataset of Regular Metaphor

Paper · 2026 · Anna Temerko, Pablo Gamallo and Marcos Garcia

Summary

The authors address a gap in lexical semantics resources. Regular metonymy has dedicated datasets, but no comparable corpus exists for regular metaphor. Regular metaphor refers to conventionalized figurative mappings that recur across many words of a semantic domain and have become ordinary senses of polysemous words. They describe the design of an English dataset in progress. It targets ten regular polysemy patterns, adapted from the WordNet-based regularity study of Lombard et al. (2024). Sentences are drawn from a general-language corpus and manually labeled as instantiating either the literal or the metaphorical sense of each target word. Sense inventories are fixed with dictionary definitions rather than subjective human ratings of conventionality. So far, two patterns have been built out, covering both nouns and verbs where possible. The paper reports the resource's design rather than experimental results. Its value lies in enabling systematic comparisons of metaphor and metonymy as regular sense-extension mechanisms. It also supports probing of neural language models, which can capture both graded and category-like aspects of meaning.

Key points

  • Lombard et al. (2024) proposed 15 patterns. The authors excluded those with fewer than 10 fitting words and those relying on specialized terminological senses, leaving 10 patterns.
  • The two patterns completed so far are animal cry – communication (e.g., bark, bellow, bleat, bray, growl, grunt, roar) and natural phenomenon – way of occurring (e.g., deluge, flood, inundate, rain, ripple, shower, torrent, wave, backwash).
  • Each item records the pattern, word, PoS (N/V), sense label (L for literal, M for metaphorical) and a naturalistic example sentence.
  • Sense descriptions are taken from the OED and the American Heritage Dictionary (AHD). This choice follows evidence from Reimann and Scheffler (2024) that dictionaries judge conventionalization more reliably than human scoring.
  • Planned uses include distributional modeling, analysis of contextualized LM representations, clustering and sense induction.

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

 Institutions

🎓Universidade de Santiago de CompostelaSantiago de Compostela · Spain13 works · 364 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 18,614 worksArtificial Intelligence · 17,965 worksArts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 worksPsychology · 1,649 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 930 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Idioms & multiword expressions · 222 works

Cite

Cite as Anna Temerko, Pablo Gamallo and Marcos Garcia. 2026. Figurative, Polysemous, Conventional: Designing a Dataset of Regular Metaphor. Proceedings of the Workshop on Structured Linguistic Data and Evaluation (SLiDE).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/5b4647to68fk

@inproceedings{temerko2026figurative,
  title = {{Figurative, Polysemous, Conventional: Designing a Dataset of Regular Metaphor}},
  author = {Anna Temerko, Pablo Gamallo and Marcos Garcia},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Structured Linguistic Data and Evaluation (SLiDE)},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/5b4647to68fk},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/5b4647to68fk}
}

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