As Cool as a Cucumber: Towards a Corpus of Contemporary Similes in Serbian

TL;DR

This paper introduces a semi-automated method for collecting contemporary Serbian similes from the web, expanding an existing corpus and exploring crowdsourcing for further curation.

Contribution

It presents a novel methodology combining text mining and crowdsourcing to build and update a corpus of modern Serbian similes.

Findings

Expanded the simile corpus from 333 to 779 expressions.

Demonstrated the effectiveness of text mining in extracting similes.

Explored crowdsourcing as a tool for simile curation.

Abstract

Similes are natural language expressions used to compare unlikely things, where the comparison is not taken literally. They are often used in everyday communication and are an important part of cultural heritage. Having an up-to-date corpus of similes is challenging, as they are constantly coined and/or adapted to the contemporary times. In this paper we present a methodology for semi-automated collection of similes from the world wide web using text mining techniques. We expanded an existing corpus of traditional similes (containing 333 similes) by collecting 446 additional expressions. We, also, explore how crowdsourcing can be used to extract and curate new similes.