Interpretation of metaphors in Chinese poetry: Where did Li Bai place his emotions?

Abstract

Abstract Recently, with an increasing number of metaphor studies being conducted, research on metaphor interpretation has set off an upsurge. Although a multitude of studies on the interpretation of metaphors exists, many are limited to the understanding of literal meanings without attempting an interpretation of hidden emotions in metaphorical expressions. There are particularly few studies on metaphorical emotions interpretation in literary studies with rich and implicit emotions, such as classical Chinese poetry. This study proposes the interpretation of the metaphorical emotions of special objects in Chinese poetry based on emotion distribution. We present a statistical approach to calculate the emotion distribution of our target objects by exploiting contextual emotion mining. According to the emotion distribution, the emotion with the highest probability is considered the metaphorical emotion of the target object. Subsequently, the metaphorical emotion can be determined as a positive or negative sentiment based on expert annotations. Using the proposed method, we have tested two representative objects, ‘月’ (moon) and ‘风’ (wind), and the accuracy performances were 84% and 83.33%, respectively, for sentiment detection and 66% and 70% for emotion-specific metaphorical interpretation. The results demonstrate that our approach can be used to assist readers with metaphorical emotional understanding in Chinese poetry.