Metaphor as a Medium for Emotion: An Empirical Study
PRESENTER:
Saif M. Mohammad
NRC
ABSTRACT:
It is generally believed that a metaphor tends to have a stronger
emotional impact than a literal statement; however, there is no
quantitative study establishing the extent to which this is true. Further,
the mechanisms through which metaphors convey emotions are not well
understood. We present the first data-driven study comparing the
emotionality of metaphorical expressions with that of their literal
counterparts. Our results indicate that metaphorical usages are, on
average, significantly more emotional than literal usages. We also show
that this emotional content is not simply transferred from the source
domain into the target, but rather is a result of meaning composition and
interaction of the two domains in the metaphor.
This is joint work with Ekaterina Shutova and Peter D. Turney
I will also give a one or two-slide overview of other recent work on
stance classification in tweets and on using best-worst scaling for
real-valued sentiment annotations.