Encoding information on metaphoric expressions 
 in WordNet-like resources* 
 
Antonietta Alonge 
Sezione di Linguistica 
Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia  
Università di Perugia 
Piazza Morlacchi, 11 
Perugia 06100 - ITALY  
antoalonge@libero.it 
Margherita Castelli 
Sezione di Linguistica 
Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia  
Università di Perugia 
Piazza Morlacchi, 11 
Perugia 06100 - ITALY  
castelli@unipg.it 
 
 
Abstract 
In this paper we address the issue of the 
encoding of information on metaphors in 
a WordNet-like database, i.e. the Italian 
wordnet in EuroWordNet (ItalWordNet). 
When analysing corpus data we find a 
huge number of metaphoric expressions 
which can be hardly dealt with by using 
as reference database ItalWordNet. In 
particular, we have compared information 
contained both in dictionaries of Italian 
and in ItalWordNet with actual uses of 
words found in a corpus. We thus put 
forward proposals to enrich a resource 
like ItalWordNet with relevant informa-
tion. 
1 Introduction 
Lexical resources are a fundamental part of natural 
language processing systems and many research 
projects in the last decades have been devoted to 
build them. Notwithstanding, work is still needed 
to envisage what information should be encoded in 
which resource, and how, in order to deal with the 
central problem of word sense disambiguation.  
As becomes clear when analysing textual cor-
pora, novel uses of words occur frequently and, in 
particular, metaphoric new uses of them. Re-
sources which simply list the different 
polysemous senses of a word without saying any-
thing about how they relate to each other are not 
useful in such cases. One such resource is Word-
Net (WN), together with its ‘relative-resource’, i.e. 
EuroWordNet (EWN).
1
  
In this paper we start by briefly recalling the 
theory of metaphor as a cognitive rather than a lin-
guistic phenomenon, proposed by Lakoff and 
Johnson (1980) and Lakoff (1993), that has 
spawned a variety of research in various fields 
connected with the study of language.
2
 Then, we 
take into analysis examples of words displaying 
metaphorical sense extensions and discuss data 
from the Italian wordnet in EWN (ItalWordNet - 
                                                           
* The present paper is the outcome of a collaborative effort. 
For the specific concerns of the Italian Academy only, A. 
Alonge is responsible for sections 3 and 4; M. Castelli for 
sections 1, 2, and 5. 
1
 EWN is a multilingual database developed within the ho-
monymous project carried out in the EC Language Engineer-
ing  programme (LE-4003 and LE-8328). Within the project, 
WordNet-like databases for various European languages were 
developed, connected by means of an Interlingual-Index. 
Complete information on EWN can be found at its website: 
http:// www.hum.uva.nl/~ewn/gwa.htm. 
2
  Browse the ‘Center for the Cognitive Science of Metaphor 
Online’ for references at work on metaphor and links to other 
websites: http://philosphy.uoregon.edu/metaphor/metaphor.htm. 
See the Berkeley Conceptual Metaphor Home Page - db at 
http://cogsci.berkeley.edu/ for a database of conceptual meta-
phors.
 
 A similar database is being developed also for German 
and French: http://www.rrz.uni-hamburg.de/metaphern (cf. 
Eilts and Lönneker, 2002).
 
IWN).
3
 Finally, we propose a way of dealing with 
metaphors encoding in resources such as 
EWN/IWN, which can be useful to obtain informa-
tion which is necessary for word sense disam-
biguation. 
2 Metaphor 
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and Lakoff (1993) 
show that metaphor is not just a poetical way of 
speaking, rather it is deeply embedded in our lan-
guage, culture and the way we think. Metaphor 
affects how we experience and interact with the 
world and other people: “the human conceptual 
system is metaphorically structured and defined. 
Metaphors as linguistic expressions are possible 
precisely because there are metaphors in a person’s 
conceptual system.” (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: 
6). 
Thus, metaphor is a cognitive rather than a lin-
guistic phenomenon, and word senses are related in 
terms of their underlying conceptual domains. 
Metaphoric linguistic expressions are manifesta-
tions of ‘conceptual metaphors’, i.e. metaphorical 
structures which are present in our minds and re-
late a concrete source domain with a more abstract 
target domain. In other words, metaphoric expres-
sions are the superficial realization of the mapping 
we perform from a ‘literal’ source semantic do-
main to a ‘figurative’ target semantic domain. At 
least two consequences follow from this perspec-
tive which should be considered when building a 
lexicon for NLP applications: 
 
i) metaphorical extension of word senses is a kind 
of regular polysemy (cf. Apresjan, 1973): e.g., He 
arrived (‘came here’ or ‘was born’) when we were 
20; He left us (‘went away’ or ‘died’) after some 
time; 
ii) generalizations govern inference models, i.e. 
those cases in which an inference model from a 
certain conceptual domain is used in another do-
                                                           
3
 IWN was developed within the SI-TAL (Integrated System 
for the Automatic Treatment of Language) Italian project, 
devoted to the creation of large linguistic resources and soft-
ware tools for the Italian written and spoken language process-
ing. The database was built by extending the Italian wordnet 
realized within EWN, and inherited from EWN its main 
characteristics (general structure, relations, etc.; see Alonge et 
al. (2000) and Roventini et al. (forthcoming) for a detailed 
description of the IWN database). 
main: e.g., In our relationship we have faced many 
obstacles  � It has been difficult to go ahead. 
3 Metaphoric expressions in EWN-IWN 
When looking for word sense distinctions within 
different lexical resources we see that these vary 
widely across resources.
4
 Different dictionaries 
distinguish among different senses of words in a 
sort of arbitrary way, since they are strongly influ-
enced by the purpose of the resource (the target 
audience), and have different editorial philosophies 
with respect to ‘lumping vs. splitting’ of senses 
(Atkins, 1993; Kilgarriff, 1997). Dictionaries nor-
mally contain distinctions between ‘literal’ vs. 
‘figurative’ meanings within a lexical entry. How-
ever, such information is in general, at best, ‘in-
complete’:  
1. information on metaphoric uses is not sys-
tematic in many sources, and different 
sources contain different information;  
2. when information on metaphoric sense 
extensions is present, there is generally no 
clear indication of the connection between 
the ‘basic’ and the ‘extended’ senses;  
3. data which could help to identify novel 
metaphoric expressions are not provided.  
EWN first and IWN then were built using as 
source data dictionaries available in machine-
readable form, thus they contain inconsistencies 
and shortage of data partly inherited from diction-
aries, in particular with respect to figurative lan-
guage. Consider, for instance, the verb andare (to 
go): it has 17 senses in IWN (reported below), two 
of which are strictly motion senses while the others 
are figurative senses somehow derived from the 
two basic ones, with different degrees of proximity 
to the literal senses.  
 
                                                           
4
 We assume some sort of intuitive pre-theoretical notion of 
word-sense, which we are well aware that can be disputed. 
Much research has been devoted at the issues of what a word-
sense is and if word-senses ‘exist’ at all and should be consid-
ered as the basic units of the lexicon. Although we agree with 
views according to which “word senses exist only relative to a 
task” (Kilgarriff, 1997: 1), and are at the same time appealed 
by proposals for ‘coarse coding’ (Harris, 1994), we still be-
lieve that a WN-like structure, taking the concepts and the 
synsets referring to them as the ‘building blocks’ of the (men-
tal) lexicon, is both appropriate as a representation of lexical 
knowledge (with the basic idea of a net linking the concepts) 
and can be used as a resource for NLP, provided that the pos-
sible uses and actual limits of such a resource are kept clear. 
Synset Definition 
{andare 1, 
muovere 5, 
gire 1, ire 1}  
muoversi, spostarsi, senza meta o senza che la
meta sia indicata (to move or to change one’s
place without a goal, or without a specified 
goal) 
{andare 2, 
recarsi 1, por-
tarsi 1, trasfe-
rirsi 1} 
muoversi, spostarsi verso una meta più o
meno chiaramente definita (to move, to chan-
ge one’s place toward a more or less clearly
defined goal) 
{andare 3}  
essere collocato, essere destinato ad essere 
messo in un dato luogo (to be located or to be
intended to be put in a specific place) 
{andare 4} 
sentirsi in un certo modo (to feel in a certain
way) 
{andare 5} trasformarsi (to transform - reflexive) 
{andare 6, 
morire 1, di-
partirsi 2, …} 
cessare di vivere (to die, to cease living) 
{andare 7, 
correre 12} 
di moneta e simili, avere corso legale (of
money, to be legal tender) 
{andare 8} dover essere (to have to be (done)) 
{andare 9, 
calzare 1} 
essere adatto, calzare (to fit (s.o.)) 
{andare 10, 
piacere 1, gar-
bare 1, …} 
essere gradito, piacevole (to like) 
{andare 11, 
precedere 2, 
progredire 2, 
…} 
andare avanti, progredire in qualcosa (fig.) (to 
go ahead, to progress in something (figura-
tive)) 
{andare 12, 
passare 10, 
dileguarsi 4, 
…} 
venire meno, dileguarsi (to fade away, to
disappear) 
{andare 13}  
continuare in un'azione (seguito da un gerun-
dio) (to continue doing something) 
{andare 14, 
estendersi 2, 
arrivare 6} 
estendersi fino (to extend to) 
{andare 15, 
dare 17, con-
durre 1, …} 
dare accesso (to lead into) 
{andare 16, 
funzionare 1} 
adempiere la propria funzione (to work, to
function) 
{andare 17, 
muoversi 4, 
spostarsi 2} 
(fig.) spostarsi (figurative – to move, to chan-
ge one’s opinion, etc.) 
 
Table 1. Senses of andare in IWN 
 
Senses 5, 6, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 16 and 17 are clearly 
more directly derived from the two basic senses 
(either the first or the second): e.g., senses 5, 6, 11, 
12 can all be linked to the general ‘CHANGE IS 
MOTION’ conceptual metaphor; sense 13 to the 
‘ACTION IS MOTION’ metaphor, etc.  The re-
maining senses seem also connected with the mo-
tion senses, although in a less direct way. 
5
 Only 
two of the metaphoric senses are marked as ‘figu-
rative’ and no indication is provided of the connec-
tion between each metaphoric sense and the basic 
literal sense it is derived from. Moreover, if we 
take into consideration dictionaries of Italian like 
Zingarelli or Garzanti,
6
 we find different sense 
definitions for andare: Zingarelli has 13 senses 
(with some information on connection of senses) 
and Garzanti has 11 (with no indication of sense 
connections). Finally, no information is provided, 
either in IWN or in the other resources, which 
could be used to automatically disambiguate novel 
metaphoric uses of the verb. 
If we then look for occurrences of andare in a 
corpus of Italian (the PAROLE corpus, partly 
available at http://www.ilc.cnr.it/pisystem/demo/ 
demo_dbt/demo_corpus/index.htm; cf. Goggi et 
al., 2000), we find occurrences of the verb which 
are hardly linked to the senses provided in our re-
sources. Consider just two examples taken from 
this corpus: 
a. Borg è già tornato e se n`è già andato in un 
mondo tutto suo (Borg has already come back 
and he has gone into his own world) 
b. Altri sono andati con la memoria alle im-
magini televisive della guerra del Golfo (Oth-
ers went with their memory to the television 
images of the Gulf war). 
These two uses of the verb are quite frequent in 
spoken language, however they are not accounted 
for in the resources considered. 
When comparing corpus occurrences of words 
with information encoded in IWN, as in other lexi-
cal resources, one normally sees that there is a sur-
prisingly high frequency of figurative senses in 
                                                           
5
 E.g.,  sense 8 is found in sentences like “Questo lavoro va 
fatto subito” (This work has to be done immediately), where 
andare expresses a duty. We might suppose the existence of a 
conceptual metaphor like “TO FULFIL ONE’S DUTY IS TO 
MOVE TO A GOAL”. This could be linked to a more general 
“ACCOMPLISHING SOMETHING IS REACHING A 
GOAL” metaphor, again connected with the “ACTION IS 
MOTION” metaphor. Of course, this analysis needs to be 
deepened; in particular, among other cases, one should also 
take into consideration the use of  venire (to come), which in 
its basic sense indicates opposite direction with respect to 
andare, in sentences like “Questo lavoro viene fatto regolar-
mente” (This work is done regularly).  
6
 Lo Zingarelli 1999 in CD-ROM, 1999, Zanichelli, Bologna; 
Il nuovo dizionario italiano Garzanti, 1991, Garzanti, Milano. 
real texts but most of these senses are not de-
scribed in such resources (cf. Nimb and Sanford 
Pedersen, 2000, for data identified within the 
SIMPLE EC project and the solutions proposed in 
that context). Alonge and Castelli (2002a) take into 
account corpus occurrences of the verb colpire (to 
hit/to strike/to shoot) and the noun colpo 
(blow/stroke/shot), and compare the results of this 
analysis with data found for these words within 
IWN, concluding that IWN lacks precise informa-
tion on frequent metaphoric uses of colpire and 
colpo. Indeed, the data provided show that by ana-
lyzing a large general corpus various metaphoric 
expressions are clearly distinguishable which are 
not (consistently) identified in IWN or in other 
resources. Thus, how should these figurative 
senses be accounted for in a WN-like resource (in 
particular, in EWN/IWN)? Moreover, how should 
novel, potential uses of words be dealt with in a 
resource such IWN? We believe that the ability to 
cope with these issues cannot be set aside if IWN, 
or similar resources, has to be used for word sense 
disambiguation of ‘real’ texts. 
4 Proposals for metaphors encoding in 
IWN/EWN 
As already mentioned, by analyzing a large general 
corpus various well-established metaphoric expres-
sions are clearly distinguishable which are not con-
sistently encoded in IWN or in other resources. 
Since the necessity of adding corpora as sources 
for building computational lexicons is probably 
unquestionable, our main point is that one should 
deal with these issues by adopting a well estab-
lished and generally accepted theoretical frame-
work like that proposed by Lakoff and Johnson 
(1980) and Lakoff (1993), within which a large 
system of conventional conceptual metaphors has 
been described. By adopting that perspective many 
subtle, but relevant, differences may be highlighted 
in a principled way (cf. Alonge and Castelli, 
2002a; 2002b). These should be encoded in 
EWN/IWN at the synset level to account for al-
ready well established word figurative senses. Of 
course, no lexical resource will probably ever be 
able to exhaustively account for the phenomenon 
which Cruse (1986) termed modulation, determin-
ing that “a single sense can be modified in an 
unlimited number of ways for different contexts, 
each context emphasizing certain semantic traits, 
and obscuring and suppressing others” (Cruse, 
1986: 52). However, each resource should be de-
signed so to be as complete and coherent as possi-
ble. 
A more central issue to be tackled, however, is 
that of how to encode information on the system-
atic nature of conceptual metaphors, determining 
the possibility to produce and/or understand novel 
metaphoric uses of words. When we understand 
novel metaphoric expressions we make reference 
to a system of established mappings between con-
crete conceptual domains and abstract ones. That 
is, there is a pre-existent knowledge which con-
strains our possibility to produce and/or understand 
novel metaphoric expressions. For instance, a 
group of conventional conceptual metaphors which 
characterizes as a subset of the more general 
‘CHANGES ARE MOVEMENTS’ metaphor is 
the following: ‘BIRTH IS ARRIVAL’, ‘LIFE IS 
BEING PRESENT HERE’, ‘DEATH IS 
DEPARTURE’ (cf. Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). 
Thus, we can say, for instance (examples are ours): 
- Nostro figlio è arrivato (= è nato) dopo dieci 
anni di matrimonio. 
(Our child arrived (= was born) ten years after 
our wedding) 
- Lui non è più fra noi. (= è morto) 
(He is not with us anymore. (= he is dead)) 
- Se ne è andato (è morto) all’età di venti anni. 
(He went away (he died) when he was 
twenty.) 
In IWN (or in the dictionaries considered) we find 
encoded the senses indicated in the examples for 
essere and andare but not for arrivare, even if this 
sense of the verb is attested (although infrequent) 
in the PAROLE corpus: 
c. … di figli ne sono arrivati troppi. 
(there arrived too many children). 
If we then look for the senses provided for an-
other verb, which we may potentially expect to 
display the same regular sense extension of andare 
as to die – lasciare  (to leave) –, we do not find any 
relevant information in our lexical resources as 
well, although also this verb metaphoric sense oc-
curs once in our corpus: 
d. Mentre scrivo ci ha appena lasciato. La sua 
morte… 
(While I’m writing he/she has just left us. 
His/her death…). 
In fact, these metaphoric uses of arrivare and las-
ciare, although not frequent in our corpus (com-
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Italian wn 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
ILI 
{cane}
posed of texts taken from newspapers, magazines, 
essays, novels, etc), are quite normal in everyday 
spoken language. 
In order to build a resource which actually ac-
counts for our lexical-conceptual knowledge and 
can be used as a resource for NLP, we have to find 
a way to encode also knowledge about mappings 
between conceptual domains resulting in potential 
metaphoric expressions production. This informa-
tion should be encoded at a higher level than the 
synset level, since it is information on regular 
polysemy affecting whole conceptual domains.  
In IWN, as in EWN, we have three fundamental 
levels of representation of semantic information:  
• the synset level, where language-specific 
synsets information is encoded;  
• the level of the linking to the Interlingual-
Index (ILI – an unstructured list of WN 1.5 
synsets) to which synsets from the specific 
wordnet point (by means of so-called 
‘equivalence-relations’) in order to per-
form the linking between different lan-
guage-specific wordnets;  
• the Top Ontology (TO), a hierarchy of 
language-independent concepts, reflecting 
fundamental semantic distinctions, which 
may (or may not) be lexicalised in various 
ways, or according to different patterns, in 
different languages: via the ILI, all the 
concepts in the language specific wordnet 
are directly or indirectly (via hyponymy 
relations) linked to the TO.
7
  
The figure below exemplifies the relations 
among the three levels. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
                                                           
7
 Note that in EWN/IWN not all the synsets are directly linked 
to TO. Actually, only the so-called ‘Base Concepts’ (cf. 
Vossen, 1999) are explicitly linked to ILIs connected with Top 
Concepts. However, the links to Top Concepts are inherited by 
all the other synsets within the wordnets via hyponymy rela-
tions with the Base Concepts. 
 
 
Top Ontology  
 
 
 
 
                                    
 
 
 
 
                                                              
 
 
                                                 
  
 
 
 
Figure 1. Levels of representation of semantic 
information in EWN/IWN 
 
Since the distinctions at the level of the TO are 
language independent, it is necessary to show 
metaphoric regular polysemy found in a specific 
language at a different level. Indeed, there are cul-
ture-constrained differences in the metaphor sys-
tem (see, e.g., the differences linked to orientation 
reported by Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, determining 
for instance that in some cultures the future is in 
front of us and in others the future is behind us) 
which should receive a representation at some 
other level. 
In EWN some cases of regular polysemy were 
dealt with at the level of the linking of each lan-
guage-specific wordnet with the ILI. Via the ILI 
the generalizations over concepts were then pro-
jected to the TO. Generalizations were stated di-
rectly at the level of the ILI and automatically 
inherited from all the synsets which in a language-
specific wordnet were linked to the ILI synsets 
involved in the generalizations themselves. An 
automatically added generalization could be later 
manually deleted in case it did not apply to a spe-
cific language (cf. Peters et al., 1998). For in-
stance, the lexeme scuola (school) in Italian has 
got (among others) two related senses indicating 
{animale}      {animal} 
ANIMAL
LIVING 
NATURAL 
 
… 
wn
one the institution and the other the building. This 
is a case of regular polysemy since many words 
indicating institutions also indicate buildings in 
Italian (as, of course, in other languages). Once the 
Italian school-institution and the school-building 
synsets were linked to the appropriate synsets in 
the ILI, the system automatically added to both 
Italian synsets another equivalence link, called 
EQ_METONYM, to a kind of ‘composite ILI unit’, 
clustering the ‘institution’ and ‘building’ ILI syn-
sets into a coarser-grained sense group. Thus, our 
synsets, via the ILI, were linked to tops in the TO 
indicating concepts in different domains. A similar 
operation was automatically performed for senses 
reflecting diathesis alternations for verbs (related 
by EQ_DIATHESIS), such as causative and inchoa-
tive pairs. In case a kind of regular polysemy did 
not display in our language, the automatically gen-
erated link to the relevant composite ILI unit had 
to be manually deleted. 
We think that an EQ_METAPHOR relation point-
ing to new composite ILI units should be created to 
account for regular metaphoric extensions of 
senses in  EWN/IWN. Via the ILI links the con-
nection between specific synsets in a language 
would also be shown at the TO level as connection 
(mapping) between top concepts (linked to differ-
ent conceptual domains). On the other hand, the 
mapping at the TO level could be used to infer 
which words might potentially display a certain 
metaphoric extension, when this is not encoded at 
the synset level. Indeed, the link to a Top Concept 
is inherited along taxonomies within the language-
specific wordnets, thus all the synsets directly or 
indirectly connected (through hyponymy) with an-
other synset would inherit the links to Top Con-
cepts related to different conceptual domains. 
Thus, even when specific information on a possible 
metaphoric sense extension of a word is not en-
coded in the database it would be possible to de-
rive it. Consider the case of lasciare (to leave), 
mentioned above, and related conceptual meta-
phors. This verb has 9 senses in IWN (i.e., it is 
found within 9 synsets), one of which (sense 2) is 
defined as “andarsene da un luogo temporanea-
mente o definitivamente” (to go away from a place 
temporarily or definitively): this verb sense is a 
(direct) hyponym of the {partire 1, andare via 1} 
synset which, via an equivalence link to the {go, 
go away, depart, travel away} ILI synset, is con-
nected with the Top Concepts ‘BoundedEvent’, 
indicating change of state; ‘Location’, indicating 
that the change referred to is a change of location; 
and ‘Physical’, indicating that the change of loca-
tion involves ‘physical entities’. As was done in 
EWN for other kinds of sense extensions, a ‘com-
posite ILI unit’ should be created, clustering the 
‘departure’ ILI synset (already linked to our {par-
tire 1, andare 1} synset) and the ‘death’ ILI synset 
and accounting for the ‘DEATH IS DEPARTURE’ 
conceptual metaphor: then, the Italian synset al-
ready manually linked to the ‘departure’ ILI synset 
would also be connected, through an 
EQ_METAPHOR relation, to the ‘death’ ILI synset.
8
 
Consequently, the same synset would be, at the 
same time, connected both to the synset(s) indicat-
ing ‘death’ in Italian and to the relevant Top Con-
cepts in the TO. All the hyponyms of {partire 1, 
andare via 1} would then inherit these connections; 
thus, also lasciare would display the same links, 
even if no specific information is encoded at the 
synset level. Again, cf. the figure below for a 
schematic representation of these relations. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Figure 2. The lasciare links 
                                                           
8
 Note that for languages not displaying this sense extension 
the equivalence relation should be manually deleted. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
ILI 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
COMPOSITE ILI 
Top Ontology
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Italian wn
{partire 1, 
andare via 1} 
{lasciare 2} 
{go, go away, 
depart, travel 
away} 
{die, pip out, de-
cease, perish, 
go,…} 
LOCATION 
Bounded 
Event
… 
In this way, information on potential metaphoric 
uses of lasciare (and, of course, other words in the 
wordnet) could be retrieved, by going from Top 
Concepts to ILI synsets and then to language-
specific wordnets. 
5 Conclusion 
In this paper we have discussed a way to deal with 
metaphoric expressions in WN-like databases 
which involves: i) a more careful analysis of tex-
tual corpora and the reference to theoretical well-
established views of metaphor to encode more de-
tailed information at the synset level; ii) the exten-
sions of devices already used in EWN in order to 
encode information on the mapping between con-
ceptual domains, causing the possibility to have 
certain metaphoric sense extensions in a language. 
The research on the latter issue needs to be further 
carried out; in particular: 
- we want to deepen the issue of the weight that 
other relations than hyponymy (cf. Alonge et 
al., 1998; Roventini et al., forthcoming) have 
in order to determine when a concept belongs 
to a certain conceptual domain for which 
metaphoric sense extensions inherited from 
the TO apply; 
- we think that the EWN TO should be ex-
tended with more concepts, since at the mo-
ment it only contains very general semantic 
distinctions. 

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