Referential Nominal Metaphor Identification in Myanmar Language

Abstract

Metaphor, one of the figurative usages, becomes a problem in natural language processing (NLP). Identification of metaphor becomes one of the attentive research works in NLP. Metaphor can be classified as nominal metaphor, verbal metaphor and adjective metaphor. In nominal metaphor, two types of nominal metaphor can be found: noun-noun metaphor and referential nominal metaphor. This paper presents the identification of referential nominal metaphor in Myanmar language. Identification of referential nominal metaphor requires to extract the two reference nouns and extracting rules are created for reference nouns extraction. The structure of rules for reference nouns extraction and how to extract the reference nouns using these extracting rules are explained detail in this paper. Myanmar WordNet, wordnet2sql and bilingual dictionary are used to identify the referential nominal metaphor. The experiments are done on the sentences of 6 genres, news, novels, articles, conversational, formal and overall sentences. The precision results for these 6 genres can be found 75% for news, 81% for novels, 83% for articles, 78% for conversational, 81% for formal and 81% for overall respectively. General discussion about the issues and explanations are also described in this paper.