This thesis project is about the annotation of metaphorical language in historical corpora and what computational resources can support that process. Metaphor is a kind of extended language use in which the literal meaning nevertheless plays a central role in what speakers intend to communicate. Literal meanings themselves are established through use, and they are in constant flux, both on the micro level, from use to use, and on the macro level, over the course of decades and centuries. Therefore it can be difficult to know, from a historical distance, what literal meanings were established at a given time and place, which makes metaphor analysis in historical corpora especially challenging. Thus it is the goal of this project to investigate computational methods of determining the presence and prevalence of word senses in a way that is tunable to time- or genre-specific portions of a particular corpus and still usable when only small amounts of corpus data are available. It is hypothesized that this kind of information about the literal meanings reflected in a particular corpus would provide the kind of resource that would be helpful in the analysis of metaphor in a historical setting.
SFB 1475, B01: Mixed-Methods Analysis of Medical Metaphorizations in Medieval German Texts
Reference Corpus of Middle High German
Reference Corpus of Early New High German
Roussel, Adam. 2024. “Adapting Measures of Literality for Use with Historical Language Data.” In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities, 209–215, Miami, USA. [ACL]
Roussel, Adam. 2024. “Tabular JSON: A Proposal for a Pragmatic Linguistic Data Format.” In Proceedings of the 20th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS 2024), 166–172, Vienna, Austria. [ACL]
Roussel, Adam, Thomas Klein, Stefanie Dipper, Klaus-Peter Wegera, Claudia Wich-Reif. 2024. “Reference Corpus of Middle High German (1050–1350)” Ruhr-Universität Bochum: [Project Homepage] Version 2.0. ISLRN 937-948-254-174-0. [Zenodo]
Dipper, Stefanie, Adam Roussel, Alexandra Wiemann, Won Kim, and Tra-My Nguyen. 2024. “Guidelines for the Annotation of Deliberate Linguistic Metaphor.” In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Figurative Language Processing (FigLang 2024), 53–58, Mexico City, Mexico (Hybrid). [ACL]
Roussel, Adam. 2023. “Lexical Semantics with Vector Symbolic Architectures.” In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Resources and Representations for Under-Resourced Languages and Domains (RESOURCEFUL-2023), 53–61. Tórshavn, Faroe Islands. [PDF] [Repo]
Roussel, Adam, Fabian Barteld, and Katrin Ortmann. 2020. “CorA-XML Utils: Processing Diplomatic Transcriptions in Historical Corpora.” (Poster at DGfS 2020 in Hamburg, Germany.) [Repo]
Ortmann, Katrin, Adam Roussel, and Stefanie Dipper. 2019. “Evaluating off-the-Shelf NLP Tools for German.” In Proceedings of the 15th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS 2019): Long Papers, 212–222. Erlangen, Germany: German Society for Computational Linguistics & Language Technology. [PDF]
Dipper, Stefanie, Simone Schultz-Balluff, Marcel Bollmann, Julia Krasselt, Florian Petran, Adam Roussel, Katrin Ortmann, Katharina Bort, and Helena Wedig. 2018. “Anselm Corpus.” Ruhr-Universität Bochum: [Project Homepage]. Version 1.0. ISLRN 568-178-806-856-4.
Kolhatkar, Varada, Adam Roussel, Stefanie Dipper, and Heike Zinsmeister. 2018. “Anaphora With Non-Nominal Antecedents in Computational Linguistics: A Survey.” Computational Linguistics 44 (3): 547–612. [PDF].
Roussel, Adam. 2018. “Detecting and Resolving Shell Nouns in German.” In Proceedings of the NAACL Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora, and Coreference (CRAC), 61–67. New Orleans, LA, USA. [PDF].
Roussel, Adam, Stefanie Dipper, Sarah Jablotschkin, and Heike Zinsmeister. 2018. “Towards the Automatic Resolution of Anaphora with Non-Nominal Antecedents: Insights from Annotation.” In Proceedings of the 14th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS). Vienna, Austria. [PDF].
Simonjetz, Fabian, and Adam Roussel. 2016. “Crosslinguistic Annotation of German and English Shell Noun Complexes.” In Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS), 265–278. Bochum, Germany. [PDF].