《MRC+_lrec2016_final》.docx

Automatic Expansion of the MRC Psycholinguistic Database Imageability Ratings Ting Liu1, Kit Cho1, George Aaron Broadwell1, Samira Shaikh1, Tomek Strzalkowski1, 2, John Lien1, Sarah Taylor3, Laurie Feldman1, Boris Yamrom1, Nick Webb1, Umit Boz1, Ignacio Cases1, Ching-sheng Lin1 1 University at Albany, State University of New York 2 Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences 3 Sarah M. Taylor Consulting, LLC E-mail: tliu@, kitwcho@ Abstract Recent studies in metaphor extraction across several languages (Broadwell et al., 2013; Strzalkowski et al., 2013) have shown that word imageability ratings are highly correlated with the presence of metaphors in text. Information about imageability of words can be obtained from the MRC Psycholinguistic Database (MRCPD) for English words and Léxico Informatizado del Espa?ol Programa (LEXESP) for Spanish words, which is a collection of human ratings obtained in a series of controlled surveys. Unfortunately, word imageability ratings were collected for only a limited number of words: 9,240 words in English, 6,233 in Spanish; and are unavailable at all in the other two languages studied: Russian and Farsi. The present study describes an automated method for expanding the MRCPD by conferring imageability ratings over the synonyms and hyponyms of existing MRCPD words, as identified in Wordnet. The result is an expanded MRCPD+ database with imagea-bility scores for more than 100,000 words. The appropriateness of this expansion process is assessed by examining the structural coherence of the expanded set and by validating the expanded lexicon against human judgment. Finally, the performance of the metaphor extraction system is shown to improve significantly with the expanded database. This paper describes the process for English MRCPD+ and the resulting lexical resource. The process is analogous for other languages. Keywords: MRC Psycholinguistic Database (MRCPD), wordnet, metaphor, imageability Introduction Scientists