A Dataset for Metaphor Detection in Early Medieval Hebrew Poetry
This work addresses a key problem for scholars in the Humanities, such as literature and linguistics, by offering a resource for analyzing metaphor in historical texts, though it is incremental as it focuses on dataset creation.
The paper tackles the challenge of distinguishing figurative and literal language in early medieval Hebrew poetry by introducing a new expert-annotated dataset for metaphor detection, providing baseline results to support further research.
There is a large volume of late antique and medieval Hebrew texts. They represent a crucial linguistic and cultural bridge between Biblical and modern Hebrew. Poetry is prominent in these texts and one of its main haracteristics is the frequent use of metaphor. Distinguishing figurative and literal language use is a major task for scholars of the Humanities, especially in the fields of literature, linguistics, and hermeneutics. This paper presents a new, challenging dataset of late antique and medieval Hebrew poetry with expert annotations of metaphor, as well as some baseline results, which we hope will facilitate further research in this area.