“A Buster Keaton of Linguistics”: First Automated Approaches for the Extraction of Vossian Antonomasia

Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, pages 6238–6243, Hong Kong, China, November 3–7, 2019. c⃝2019 Association for Computational Linguistics 6238 “A Buster Keaton of Linguistics”: First Automated Approaches for the Extraction of Vossian Antonomasia Michel Schwab,1 Robert Jäschke,1,2 Frank Fischer,3 and Jannik Strötgen4 1Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany 2L3S Research Center, Hannover, Germany 3National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia 4Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence, Renningen, Germany {michel.schwab,robert.jaeschke}@hu-berlin.de ffischer@hse.ru jannik.stroetgen@de.bosch.com Abstract Attributing a particular property to a person by naming another person, who is typically well- known for the respective property, is called a Vossian Antonomasia (VA). This subtpye of metonymy, which overlaps with metaphor, has a specific syntax and is especially frequent in journalistic texts. While identifying Vossian Antonomasia is of particular interest in the study of stylistics, it is also a source of er- rors in relation and fact extraction as an ex- plicitly mentioned entity occurs only metaphor- ically and should not be associated with respec- tive contexts. Despite rather simple syntac- tic variations, the automatic extraction of VA was never addressed as yet since it requires a deeper semantic understanding of mentioned entities and underlying relations. In this pa- per, we propose a first method for the extrac- tion of VAs that works completely automati- cally. Our approaches use named entity recog- nition, distant supervision based on Wikidata, and a bi-directional LSTM for postprocessing. The evaluation on 1.8 million articles of the New York Times corpus shows that our ap- proach significantly outperforms the only ex- isting semi-automatic approach for VA identi- fication by more than 30 percentage points in precision. 1 Introduction Background. Vossian Antonomasia (VA) is a stylistic device which attributes a certain property to a person by naming another (more well-known, more popular) person as a reference point. For in- stance, when Jim Koch is described as “the Steve Jobs of Beer” (Fallows, 2014), certain qualities of Steve Jobs, be it entrepreneurship or persuasiveness, are assigned to Jim Koch, co-founder and chairman of the Boston Beer Company. VA is named after Gerardus Vossius (1577– 1649), the Dutch classical scholar and author of rhetorical textbooks. Although the phenomenon is traceable back to antiquity (as shows the example of Crassus, who used to be ironically referred to as “the Palatine Venus”), it was first distinguished and described as a separate phenomenon by Vossius. It constitutes a sub-phenomenon of the classic antonomasia. In the classification of Holmqvist and Płuciennik (2010) it is called metaphorical antono- masia or antonomasia2 and is described as a com- parison “with paragons from other spheres”. VAs are particularly popular in journalistic texts. Definition. VAs consist of three parts: a source (in our example “Steve Jobs”) serves as paragon to elevate the target (“Jim Koch”) by applying a modifier (“of beer”) that provides the correspond- ing context (see Bergien, 2013). Although in most cases both the source and the target are persons, one or both …

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