Extracting and Analysing Metaphors in Migration Media Discourse - towards a Metaphor Annotation Scheme

Aug 25, 2026

Uploaded by Rizky

Study of metaphors in media discourse examines how media shape social reality and how metaphors reveal thinking about issues through cross-domain references. The paper presents a neural transfer learning approach to detect metaphorical sentences in Slovene and reports results on both a gold-standard metaphor corpus and a migration-domain corpus. Findings lead to a metaphor annotation scheme integrating linguistic level, conceptual level, and stance information for annotation of socially relevant topics.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages10

Reading Time25 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

1. Introduction

2. Related work

3. Methodology

4. Results

5. Contributions and limitations

6. Future challenges

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022) , pages 2430–2439 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 Extracting and Analysing Metaphors in Migration Media Discourse: towards a Metaphor Annotation Scheme Ana Zwitter Vitez1, Mojca Brglez1, Marko Robnik-Šikonja2, Tadej Škvorc2, Andreja Vezovnik3, Senja Pollak4 1University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, 2University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Computer and Information Science 3 University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Social Sciences 4 Jožef Stefan Institute [ana.zwittervitez@ff.uni-lj.si](ana.zwittervitez@ff.uni-lj.si), [mojca.brglez@ff.uni-lj.si](mojca.brglez@ff.uni-lj.si)[marko.robnik@fri.uni-lj.si](marko.robnik@fri.uni-lj.si), [tadej.skvorc@fri.uni-lj.si](tadej.skvorc@fri.uni-lj.si)[ ](tadej.skvorc@fri.uni-lj.si)[andreja.vezovnik@fdv.uni-lj.si](andreja.vezovnik@fdv.uni-lj.si), [senja.pollak@ijs.si](senja.pollak@ijs.si) Abstract The study of metaphors in media discourse is an increasingly researched topic as media are an important shaper of social reality and metaphors are an indicator of how we think about certain issues through references to other things. We present a neural transfer learning method for detecting metaphorical sentences in Slovene and evaluate its performance on a gold standard corpus of metaphors (classification accuracy of 0.725), as well as on a sample of a domain specific corpus of migrations (precision of 0.40 for extracting domain metaphors and 0.74 if evaluated only on a set of migration related sentences) . Based on empirical results and findings of our analysis, we propose a novel metaphor annotation scheme containing linguistic level, conceptual level, and stance information. The new scheme can be used for future metaphor annotations of other socially relevant topics. Keywords: metaphor annotation scheme, neural metaphor extraction, linguistic analysis, transfer learning 1. Introduction The key feature of metaphors is the establishment of parallels between two domains which are not literally connected. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) define the concept of cognitive metaphor (i. e. wave of migrants) as a metaphor comparing two domains, the source domain (wave) and the target domain (migrants) . The source domain is used in a nonliteral way, and the target domain is the one we try to describe with the non-literal linguistic expressions. Studying metaphors in media discourse is an increasingly developing field (Koller, 2004: 4) because metaphors indicate the structure of how we perceive, how we think, and what we do (Lakoff and Johnson, 1981: 5). We continually think about things through reference to other things to help us understand various phenomena we face. Consequently, metaphors can have implications not only for how we think about and understand the world, but also for how we act, the institutions we build and how we organize our society (Machin and Myer, 2012: 164) . Since media are an important shaper of social reality, metaphors in media discourse have been widely studied in the fields of media studies, semiotics, critical discourse studies, rhetoric, and critical linguistics which study metaphors in order to disclose unequal relations of power as part of wider ideological operations. Fairclough (1995) claims that metaphors are socially motivated as different metaphors may correspond to different interests and perspectives and may therefore have different ideological loadings. Moreover, perceiving the world through a particular metaphor may form the basis for social action. For instance, the metaphor wave of migrants, which metaphorically represents migrants as flood (where wave is the source domain and migrant the target domain), may act as the basis for how we perceive migrants as a danger and how we may take social and political measures such as militarization of borders to assure safety for the majoritarian populatio

FAQs

What is the main goal of the study?

To extract and analyze metaphors in migration-related media discourse and to provide a metaphor annotation scheme that supports future annotations.

How is metaphor detection performed?

By using a neural transfer learning method for metaphorical sentence detection in Slovene, adapting a method originally designed for idioms.

What does the proposed metaphor annotation scheme include?

It integrates three layers of information: linguistic level, conceptual level, and stance information.

Aug 25, 2026

Uploaded by Rizky

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