Verifying Claims About Metaphors with Large-Scale Automatic Metaphor
  Identification
Kotaro Aono Ryohei Sasano Koichi Takeda
There are several linguistic claims about situations where words are more
likely to be used as metaphors. However, few studies have sought to verify such
claims with large corpora. This study entails a large-scale, corpus-based
analysis of certain existing claims about verb metaphors, by applying metaphor
detection to sentences extracted from Common Crawl and using the statistics
obtained from the results. The verification results indicate that the direct
objects of verbs used as metaphors tend to have lower degrees of concreteness,
imageability, and familiarity, and that metaphors are more likely to be used in
emotional and subjective sentences.