Simple Discovery of COVID IS WAR Metaphors Using Word Embeddings

In the past year, the discourse on the COVID-19 pandemic has produced a great number of metaphors stemming from the more basic conceptual metaphor ILLNESS IS WAR. In this paper, we present a semi-automatic method to detect linguistic manifestations of the latter in Slovene media. The method consists of assembling a seed vocabulary of war-related words from an existing Slovene metaphor corpus, extending the vocabulary using word embeddings, and refining the extended vocabulary using intersection filtering. Our method offers a quick compilation of corpus data for further analysis, however, we also address issues related to the method’s precision and the need for manual filtering.