PROMETHEUS: A Corpus of Proverbs Annotated with Metaphors

PROMETHEUS: A Corpus of Proverbs Annotated with Metaphors G¨ozde ¨Ozbal, Carlo Strapparava, Serra Sinem Tekiro˘glu Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento-Italy gozbalde@gmail.com, strappa@fbk.eu, serrasinem@gmail.com Abstract Proverbs are commonly metaphoric in nature and the mapping across domains is commonly established in proverbs. The abundance of proverbs in terms of metaphors makes them an extremely valuable linguistic resource since they can be utilized as a gold standard for various metaphor related linguistic tasks such as metaphor identification or interpretation. Besides, a collection of proverbs from various languages annotated with metaphors would also be essential for social scientists to explore the cultural differences between those languages. In this paper, we introduce PROMETHEUS, a dataset consisting of English proverbs and their equivalents in Italian. In addition to the word-level metaphor annotations for each proverb, PROMETHEUS contains other types of information such as the metaphoricity degree of the overall proverb, its meaning, the century that it was first recorded in and a pair of subjective questions responded by the annotators. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first multi-lingual and open-domain corpus of proverbs annotated with word-level metaphors. Keywords: proverbs, metaphors, multilinguality 1. Introduction “A proverb is to speech what salt is to food”. – Arabic proverb Proverbs can be considered as descriptions of a specific sit- uation that can be applied to a broad scope of circumstances (Gibbs, 1994). The main characteristics of proverbs are their shortness, concreteness, originality and rhymed poeti- cal utterances (Mieder, 1985). They gain familiarity among the members of a society as they store their culture, concep- tual thinking and accumulated experiences (Emrich, 1972). Therefore, proverbs have high communicative and cross- cultural value and they can be an essential tool for gaining insight into the way a language group experiences and con- ceptualises the world (Wilson, 2009; Moreno, 2010). Turner and Lakoff (1989) define proverbs as commonly metaphoric in nature and they suggest Great Chain Metaphor Theory for the analysis and interpretation of proverbs. According to this theory, people can be under- stood in terms of lower-order forms of being, or lower-order forms of being can be understood in terms of human at- tributes and behaviour. As also indicated by the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), the mapping across domains stands at the core of the metaphorical con- nection and this kind of connection is very commonly es- tablished in proverbs as linguistic metaphors. Therefore, metaphors can resolve a significant amount of the figura- tive meaning in many proverbial utterances (Faycel, 2012). This richness of proverbs in terms of metaphors makes them an extremely beneficial linguistic resource as they can be utilized as a gold standard for various metaphor re- lated linguistic tasks such as metaphor identification or in- terpretation. For instance, as suggested by Shutova (2015), Machine Translation (MT) task should especially tackle metaphor identification and interpretation since metaphori- cal expressions are usually specific to each culture and lan- guage. In the same manner, proverbs would also be com- pelling for MT as they are culture-specific and …

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