Relatore : Jean-Gabriel GANASCIA

Automatic Annotation of Similes in Literary Texts

This thesis tackles the problem of the automatic recognition of similes in literary texts written in English or in French and proposes a framework to describe them from a stylistic perspective. For the purpose of this study, a simile has been defined as a syntactic structure that draws a parallel between at least two entities, lacks compositionality and is able to create an image in the receiver’s mind.
Three main points differentiate the proposed approach from existing ones: it is strongly influenced by cognitive and linguistic theories on similes and comparisons, it takes into consideration a wide range of markers and it can adapt to diverse syntactic scenarios. Concretely speaking, it relies on three interconnected modules:

• a syntactic module, which extracts potential simile candidates and identifies their components using grammatical roles and a set of handcrafted rules,
• a semantic module which separates creative similes from both idiomatic similes and literal comparisons based on the salience of the ground and semantic similarity computed from data automatically retrieved from machine-readable dictionaries;
• and an annotation module which makes use of the XML format and gives among others information on the type of comparisons (idiomatic, perceptual...) and on the semantic categories used.

Finally, the two annotation tasks we designed show that the automatic detection of figuration in similes must take into considerationFinally, the two annotation tasks we designed show that the automatic detection of figuration in similes must take into consideration a series of features among which salience, categorisation and the sentence syntax.

Pubblicazioni 2015-2017

• 2017
  • S. Mpouli, J.‑G. Ganascia : “Another Facet of Literary Similes : A Study of Noun+Colour Term Adjectives”, CORELA - COgnition, REprésentation, LAngage n°HS-21, (CERLICO-Cercle Linguistique du Centre et de l'Ouest (France)) (2017)
  • M. Riguet, S. Mpouli : “At the crossroads between the scientific and the literary discourse: Comparison as a figure of dialogism”, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, vol. 32 (suppl_2), pp. ii60-ii77, (Oxford University Press) (2017)
• 2016
  • S. Mpouli Njanga Seh : “Annotation automatique des figures de comparaison dans les textes littéraires”, these, difesa 10/03/2016, relatore Ganascia, Jean-Gabriel (2016)
  • M. Riguet, S. Mpouli : “À la croisée des discours littéraire et scientifique : La comparaison comme haute figure dialogique”, Digital Humanities 2016: Conference Abstracts, Cracovie, Poland, pp. 330-333 (2016)
• 2015
  • S. Mpouli, J.‑G. Ganascia : “Investigating the stylistic relevance of adjective and verb simile markers”, Corpus Linguistics 2015, Lancaster, United Kingdom (2015)
  • S. Mpouli, J.‑G. Ganascia : “" Pale as death " or " pâle comme la mort " : Frozen similes used as literary clichés”, EUROPHRAS2015:COMPUTERISED AND CORPUS-BASED APPROACHES TO PHRASEOLOGY: MONOLINGUAL AND MULTILINGUAL PERSPECTIVES, Malaga, Spain (2015)
  • S. Mpouli, J.‑G. Ganascia : “Extraction et analyse automatique des comparaisons et des pseudo-comparaisons pour la détection des comparaisons figuratives”, Actes de la 22^e conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles (TALN'2015), Caen, France (2015)