ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Language Communication
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1696818
This article is part of the Research TopicRethinking the Embodiment of Language: Challenges and Future HorizonsView all 8 articles
Enhancing Transparency in Source Domain Disambiguation for Metaphor Analysis: A Cross-Lingual Approach Integrating Lexical Resources, Word Embeddings, and Human Annotation
Provisionally accepted
Mojca Brglez1,2*
Kristina Pahor de Maiti Tekavčič1,3- 1University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia
- 2Institut Jozef Stefan, Ljubljana, Slovenia
- 3Institut za Novejso Zgodovino, Ljubljana, Slovenia
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Contemporary cognitive-linguistic research often seeks to consolidate metaphorical expressions into systematic mappings between source and target domains. However, the formulation of such mappings in natural language remains insufficiently systematized, frequently relying on intuition or on lexical resources that are not available for all languages. In this study, we propose a systematic, semi-automatic approach to source domain identification that enhances transparency, objectivity, and replicability in metaphor analysis while reducing annotator reliance on intuition. Building on an established semantic ontology, our method integrates bilingual lexical resources with distributional semantic representations to assign semantic domains to words, which serve as proxies for conceptual source domains. We evaluate the approach through manual annotation in Slovene, demonstrating its effectiveness for semantic tagging and metaphor analysis. In addition to quantitative evaluation, we analyze annotation disagreements, revealing how individual linguistic variation and cognitive biases shape domain attribution. A complementary error analysis identifies specific limitations of lexical resources and embeddings, offering explainable insights and directions for improvement. Together, these findings underscore both the methodological challenges and the cognitive complexity of source domain attribution in metaphor analysis.
Keywords: metaphor analysis, Semantic tagging, source domains, word embeddings, USAS ontology, Slovene
Received: 01 Sep 2025; Accepted: 10 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Brglez and Pahor de Maiti Tekavčič. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Mojca Brglez, mojca.brglez@ff.uni-lj.si
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