Collocation lists as instruments for metaphor detection in corpora

Abstract

This paper reports a study on the use of collocation lists as instruments for detecting metaphors in corpora. A collocation list contains the collocations for selected words in corpora together with concordances for those words. As corpora become more available to metaphor researchers, there is a growing need for developing ways to gain access to as much data as the corpus can offer. The research described here has hopefully come some way toward meeting the challanges of developing tools for metaphor corpus research. Results suggest that the collocation lists seem to be a good pre-processing instrument for corpus research of metaphor, despite accuracy problems.