Figurative Archive: an open dataset and web-based application for the study of metaphor

2025-03-01

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of large-scale, standardized, and openly accessible datasets in metaphor research. To this end, we constructed a high-quality Italian metaphor corpus comprising 997 metaphors drawn from both everyday and literary contexts, each manually annotated with multidimensional cognitive and linguistic metrics—including familiarity, word frequency, imageability, and concreteness. We introduce “inclusivity” as a novel metric to support non-discriminatory linguistic analysis and developed an interactive web platform enabling multi-criteria querying and visual exploration. Annotation reliability and validity were confirmed through correlation-based statistical validation. Currently the largest open-source Italian metaphor corpus, this resource significantly enhances cross-experimental reusability and advances standardization, reproducibility, and open science practices in metaphor research.

Technology Category

Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: AnalogyNatural Language Processing: Lexical Semantics and MorphologyApplication Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web dataEconomics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasetsSearch and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics

Abstract

Research on metaphor has steadily increased over the last decades, as this phenomenon opens a window into a range of processes in language and cognition, from pragmatic inference to abstraction and embodied simulation. At the same time, the demand for rigorously constructed and extensively normed experimental materials increased as well. Here, we present the Figurative Archive, an open database of 997 metaphors in Italian enriched with rating and corpus-based measures (from familiarity to lexical frequency), derived by collecting stimuli used across 11 studies. It includes both everyday and literary metaphors, varying in structure and semantic domains. Dataset validation comprised correlations between familiarity and other measures. The Figurative Archive has several aspects of novelty: it is increased in size compared to previous resources; it includes a novel measure of inclusiveness, to comply with current recommendations for non-discriminatory language use; it is displayed in a web-based interface, with features for a flexible and customized consultation. We provide guidelines for using the Archive in future metaphor studies, in the spirit of open science.

Problem

• Provides an open database of 997 Italian metaphors.
• Includes novel measures like inclusiveness for non-discriminatory language.
• Offers a web-based interface for flexible and customized consultation.

Innovation

• Open database with 997 Italian metaphors
• Includes novel inclusiveness measure
• Web-based interface for flexible consultation