Analysis of literal and metaphorical senses based on diachronic word embeddings

Abstract

Metaphor is pervasive in human languages. Words with metaphorical senses provide a good cut-in point to study metaphor. With diachronic word embeddings, this paper proposes an easy method to analyze literal and metaphorical senses. Based on the nearest neighbors of the target word, we can easily determine the dominant sense between the literal and metaphorical senses in a certain time span, and thus describe the development of metaphorical sense diachronically. Source domain words and target domain words can be extracted from the nearest neighbors, and thus conceptual metaphors can be derived. Experiments on the analysis of literal and metaphorical senses of Chinese words show that this method is effective and reduces manpower.