The Medical Metaphors Corpus (MCC)

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Lippolis, Anna Sofia, Nuzzolese, Andrea Giovanni, Gangemi, Aldo
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Lippolis, Anna Sofia
Nuzzolese, Andrea Giovanni
Gangemi, Aldo
author_facet Lippolis, Anna Sofia
Nuzzolese, Andrea Giovanni
Gangemi, Aldo
contents Metaphor is a fundamental cognitive mechanism that shapes scientific understanding, enabling the communication of complex concepts while potentially constraining paradigmatic thinking. Despite the prevalence of figurative language in scientific discourse, existing metaphor detection resources primarily focus on general-domain text, leaving a critical gap for domain-specific applications. In this paper, we present the Medical Metaphors Corpus (MCC), a comprehensive dataset of 792 annotated scientific conceptual metaphors spanning medical and biological domains. MCC aggregates metaphorical expressions from diverse sources including peer-reviewed literature, news media, social media discourse, and crowdsourced contributions, providing both binary and graded metaphoricity judgments validated through human annotation. Each instance includes source-target conceptual mappings and perceived metaphoricity scores on a 0-7 scale, establishing the first annotated resource for computational scientific metaphor research. Our evaluation demonstrates that state-of-the-art language models achieve modest performance on scientific metaphor detection, revealing substantial room for improvement in domain-specific figurative language understanding. MCC enables multiple research applications including metaphor detection benchmarking, quality-aware generation systems, and patient-centered communication tools.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_07993
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Medical Metaphors Corpus (MCC)
Lippolis, Anna Sofia
Nuzzolese, Andrea Giovanni
Gangemi, Aldo
Computation and Language
Metaphor is a fundamental cognitive mechanism that shapes scientific understanding, enabling the communication of complex concepts while potentially constraining paradigmatic thinking. Despite the prevalence of figurative language in scientific discourse, existing metaphor detection resources primarily focus on general-domain text, leaving a critical gap for domain-specific applications. In this paper, we present the Medical Metaphors Corpus (MCC), a comprehensive dataset of 792 annotated scientific conceptual metaphors spanning medical and biological domains. MCC aggregates metaphorical expressions from diverse sources including peer-reviewed literature, news media, social media discourse, and crowdsourced contributions, providing both binary and graded metaphoricity judgments validated through human annotation. Each instance includes source-target conceptual mappings and perceived metaphoricity scores on a 0-7 scale, establishing the first annotated resource for computational scientific metaphor research. Our evaluation demonstrates that state-of-the-art language models achieve modest performance on scientific metaphor detection, revealing substantial room for improvement in domain-specific figurative language understanding. MCC enables multiple research applications including metaphor detection benchmarking, quality-aware generation systems, and patient-centered communication tools.
title The Medical Metaphors Corpus (MCC)
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07993