We’ve compiled a list of peer-reviewed research which makes use of data from the MetaNet metaphor databases. Did we miss your paper? Let us know and we’ll add it to the list.
2026
Abdelzaher, E., & Alshammari, S. (2026). Learning from machinery misspeaks: Cognitive basis of ableism and bias in AI-generated content. Corpus Pragmatics, 10, 8. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41701-025-00216-2
Alshammari, S., & Burnazi, A. (2026). Investigating bipolar expression in confessional poetry. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 41(2), 613–628. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqag001
Coll-Florit, M. (2026). Suicide metaphors in the press: Breaking the taboo. Metaphor and Symbol, 41(2), 175–191. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2025.2580642
Donvito, A., & Lieto, A. (2026). Structural ranking of the cognitive plausibility of computational models of analogy and metaphors with the Minimal Cognitive Grid. Cognitive Systems Research, 98, 101473. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogsys.2026.101473
Neumair, P. A. (2026). Die konzeptuelle Metapher ZEIT ALS RAUM im FrameNet-Konstruktikon des Deutschen. Linguistik online, 142(1), 129–148. doi: https://doi.org/10.13092/g6v09680
Stone, D. (2026). Narrative frames: A new approach to analysing metaphors in AI ethics and policy discourse. arXiv preprint. arXiv:2603.17192. doi: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.17192
Yuan, X. (2026). Planting tax: Growth metaphors in Japanese children’s multimodal conceptualization of taxation. Metaphor and the Social World. doi: https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.26007.yua
2025
Brglez, M., Zayed, O., & Buitelaar. P. (2025). TCMeta: a multilingual dataset of COVID tweets for relation-level metaphor analysis. Language Resources and Evaluation, 59, 437–475. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-024-09725-z
Dalpanagioti, T. (2025). Going beyond war metaphors: An educational intervention about framing global issues. In W. Wei & D. Chao (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Sociopolitical Context of Language Learning (pp. 524–545). doi: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003398172-36
Hong, W. (2025). Verbalisation rétrospective comme outil diagnostique dans la formation en traduction : étude de cas de la traduction des métaphores. FORUM. Revue internationale d’interprétation et de traduction / International Journal of Interpretation and Translation, 23(2), 187–217. doi: https://doi.org/10.1075/forum.25002.hon
Lieto, A., Pozzato, G. L., Zoia, S. (2025). The delta of thought: Channeling rivers of commonsense knowledge in the sea of metaphorical interpretations. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-25) Special Track on Human-Centred AI (pp. 10316–10324). doi: https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/1146
Lugli, S., & Strapparava, C. (2025). Understanding is seeing: Metaphorical and visual reasoning in multimodal large language models. In D. Barner, N.R. Bramley, A. Ruggeri and C.M. Walker (Eds.), Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 3470–3478). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1zd9598p
Nowak, K. (2025). Modelling historical metaphors: Insights from medieval Latin. In D. Bradley, K. Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, C. Hamans, I.-H. Lee, & F. Steurs (Eds.), Contemporary Linguistics: Integrating Languages, Communities, and Technologies (pp. 433–444). De Gruyter Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004715608_036
Rajeg, G. P. W. (2025). Anger in Indonesian: “Awakening a sleeping tiger”. In Z. Kövecses , R. Benczes, & V. Szelid (Eds.), Metaphors of ANGER across Languages: Universality and Variation, Volume 1: From Akan to Italian (pp. 615–682). doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110730999-014
Righetti, G., & De Giorgis, S. (2025). “Let’s collide with the approaching car head-on”: Introducing Synthes-IS: extending the Image Schema catalogue with synthetic-data. In Proceedings of the Joint Ontology Workshops (JOWO 2025) vol. 4176. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-4176/isd-3.pdf
Stanja, J., Dannemann, S., Krugel, J., & Hoppe, A. (2025). Investigating evidence-oriented generation of synthetic text data with a generative large language model in science education. International Journal of Science Education, 1-23. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500693.2025.2538834
Yuan, X. (2025). ‘Tiny canvases, big tales’: deciphering the concept of tax through Japanese children’s postcard drawings. Visual Communication, e14703572251371121. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/14703572251371121
2024
De Giorgis, S., Gangemi, A., & Gromann, D. (2024). ImageSchemaNet: A Framester graph for embodied commonsense knowledge. Semantic Web, 15(4), 1417–1441. doi: https://doi.org/10.3233/SW-223084
Haralambous, Y. (2024). A Course in Natural Language Processing. Springer. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27226-4
Pagliai, I. (2024, May). Idiom complexity in apple-pie order: The disentanglement of decomposability and transparency. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon@ LREC-COLING 2024 (pp. 49–55). https://aclanthology.org/2024.cogalex-1.6/
Panayiotou, C. (2024). Ontological foundation for representing metaphors as part of LOD. IEEE Access, 12, 73810–73838. doi: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3396871
Pérez-Hernández, L. (2024). Metaphorical Conceptualization of the Big M. Cultura, lenguaje y representación / Culture, Language and Representation 34, 59–82. https://doi.org/10.6035/clr.7743
Pitarch, L., Anglés-Herrero, E., Liu, Y., Lal, D., Gracia, J., Rayson, P., & Rietjens, J. (2024, May). Medical-FLAVORS: A figurative language and vocabulary open repository for Spanish in the medical domain. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Patient-Oriented Language Processing (CL4Health)@ LREC-COLING 2024 (pp. 109–114). https://aclanthology.org/2024.cl4health-1.13/
Tan, X., & Bloem, J. (2024, May). Broadening the coverage of computational representations of metaphor through Dynamic Metaphor Theory. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Reference, Framing, and Perspective@ LREC-COLING 2024 (pp. 40–50). https://aclanthology.org/2024.rfp-1.5/
Wang, W. (2024). El discurso mediático sobre la salud mental: análisis de la representación metafórica de la depresión en la prensa española. [Doctoral dissertation, Universitat de Barcelona]. TDX Tesis Doctorals en Xarxa. https://hdl.handle.net/10803/693273
2023
Dalpanagioti, T. (2023). What frame semantics can offer to task‐based language teaching. TESOL Journal, 14(2), e692. doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.692
De Giorgis, S. (2023). Ethics in the flesh: formalizing moral values in embodied cognition. [Doctoral dissertation, University of Bologna]. AMS Tesi di Dottorato. https://amsdottorato.unibo.it/11040/
Joseph, R., Liu, T., Ng, A. B., See, S., & Rai, S. (2023, July). NewsMet : A ‘do it all’ dataset of contemporary metaphors in news headlines. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (pp. 10090–10104). https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.641/
Pitarch, L., Bernad, J., & Gracia, J. (2023, September). MEAN: Metaphoric Erroneous ANalogies dataset for PTLMs metaphor knowledge probing. In Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge (pp. 147–152). https://aclanthology.org/2023.ldk-1.13.pdf
Rajeg, G. P. W., & Rajeg, I. M. (2023). Exploring diachronic salience of emotion metaphors: A contrastive study of happiness metaphors in Classical Malay and Indonesian. Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 21(1), 229–265. doi: https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00133.raj
2022
Atzeni, C. (2022). A textometric exploration of United-Nations discourse on violence against women and its evolution between 1996 and 2019 : A corpus-based study of two genres in English and in French. [Doctoral dissertation, Université Paris Cité]. HAL Theses. doi: https://doi.org/10.70675/1f688d4fzf9afz4f73zbf2az27036e21d4c0
Busso, L., & Tordini, O. (2022). How do media talk about the Covid-19 pandemic? Metaphorical thematic clustering in Italian online newspapers. arXiv preprint. arXiv:2204.02106. doi: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2204.02106
Cappadona, J., Chen, Y., Lan, J., & Leong, C. (2022). Language models are unreliable spatial reasoners. Preprint. https://jcappadona.com/assets/files/spatialQA.pdf
Dalpanagioti, T. (2022). Marrying frame semantics with task-based language teaching. Selected papers on theoretical and applied linguistics, 24, 253–269. doi: https://doi.org/10.26262/istal.v24i0.9160
Donina, O. V. (2022). Detection of metaphorical compatibility using machine learning methods. Bulletin of Voronezh State University. Series: Linguistics and Intercultural Communication, 4, 128–143. doi: https://doi.org/10.17308/lic/1680-5755/2022/4/128-143
Gamonal, M. (2022, July). A descriptive study of metaphors and frames in the multilingual shared annotation task. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Dimensions of Meaning: Distributional and Curated Semantics (DistCurate 2022) (pp. 1–7). doi: https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.distcurate-1.1
Gangemi, A., & Presutti, V. (2022). Formal representation and extraction of perspectives. In P. Vossen & A. Fokkens (Eds.), Creating a More Transparent Internet: The Perspective Web, (pp. 208–228). Cambridge University Press. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108641104.016
García Cuadrado, R. (2022). Lectura Fácil: identificación de metáforas. [Doctoral dissertation, Universidad Politécnia de Madrid]. Archivo Digital UPM. https://oa.upm.es/71157/
Hong, W. (2022). Traduire les métaphores conceptuelles : enjeux linguistiques, cognitifs et culturels de la traduction des métaphores des émotions français-chinois et chinois-français. [Doctoral dissertation, Université Grenoble Alpes]. HAL Theses. https://theses.hal.science/tel-04032646
Hong, W., Rossi, C., & J.-P. Chevrot. (2022). Investigating the impact of cultural embeddedness on metaphor translation. In A. Bagasheva & N. Tincheva (Eds.), Figurativity across Domains, Modalities and Research Practices (pp. 187–210). Cambridge Scholars Publishing. https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-7787-9/
Komatsubara, T. Inconsistent metaphors and social conflicts: Incompatibility between two conceptual metaphors of the COVID-19 pandemic in Japanese. The Japanese Journal of Language in Society, 25(1), 86–101. doi: https://doi.org/10.19024/jajls.25.1_86
Khalifa, H., & Essam, B. A. (2022). How does Maya Angelou perceive the African female body?. Journal of African American Studies, 26(2), 203–220. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-022-09581-7
Lievers, F. S. (2022). Types of metaphors and their structure: Annotation guidelines between theory and practice. In M. Prandi & M. Rossi (Eds.), Researching Metaphors: Towards a Comprehensive Account. (pp. 91–107). Routledge. doi: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003184041-7
Neumair, P. A. (2022). Emotionen und Heimat: Konzeptuelle Metaphorik im öffentlich-politischen Sprechen über Flucht und Vertreibung. Studia Germanica Gedanensia, 47, 40–53. doi: https://doi.org/10.26881/sgg.2022.47.03
Skrynnikova, I. V., & Astafurova, T. N. (2022). Figurative framing around pandemic discourse: from metaphorical wars on coronavirus to wars on anti-vaxxers. Vestnik Volgogradskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta. Serii︠a︡ 2, I︠A︡zykoznanie, 21(2), 136–148. doi: https://doi.org/10.15688/jvolsu2.2022.2.11
Virdis, D. F. (2022). Ecological stylistics: Ecostylistic approaches to discourses of nature, the environment and sustainability. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10658-3
Wachowiak, L., Gromann, D., & Xu, C. (2022, December). Drum up SUPPORT: Systematic analysis of image-schematic conceptual metaphors. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Figurative Language Processing (FLP) (pp. 44–53). doi: https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.flp-1.7
Yu, N. (2022). The Moral Metaphor System: A Conceptual Metaphor Approach. Oxford University Press. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2023.2234125
2021
Al-Jumaili, Y. (2021). Metaphors of Silence in the Poetry of John Keats: A Cognitive Approach. The International Journal of Communication and Linguistic Studies, 19(1), 19-32. doi: https://doi.org/10.18848/2327-7882/CGP/v19i01/19-32
Badryzlova, Y., Lyashevskaya, O., & Nikiforova, A. (2021). Automated metaphor identification in Russian and its implications for metaphor studies. In Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Volume 2: Special Sessions 18th International Conference 18 (pp. 86-96). Springer International Publishing. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86887-1_8
Badryzlova, Y., Nikiforova, A., Lyashevskaya, O. (2021). Do topics make a metaphor? Topic modeling for metaphor identification and analysis in Russian. In van der Aalst, W.M.P., et al. (Eds.), Analysis of Images, Social Networks and Texts. AIST 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 12602 (pp. 69–81). doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72610-2_5
Beck, N. P. (2021). Transfer learning for conceptual metaphor generation. TU Prints. [Bachelor’s thesis, Technische Universität Darmstadt]. https://doi.org/10.26083/tuprints-00019359
Despot, K. Š., & Anić, A. O. (2021). A war on war metaphor: Metaphorical framings in croation discourse on COVID-19. Rasprave Instituta za hrvatski jezik i jezikoslovlje, 47(1), 173–208. doi: https://doi.org/10.31724/rihjj.47.1.6
Despot, K. Š., Sekulić Sović, M., Vilibić, M., & Mimica, N. (2021). Metaphor production by patients with schizophrenia–A case analysis. Metaphor and Symbol, 36(3), 119–140. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2021.1893606
Ilievski, F., Oltramari, A., Ma, K., Zhang, B., McGuinness, D. L., & Szekely, P. (2021). Dimensions of commonsense knowledge. Knowledge-Based Systems, 229, 107347. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.knosys.2021.107347
Isaza, C., & Ossewaarde, R. (2021). Corruption in public discourses: A comparison between Colombian and European metaphors. Public Integrity, 23(4), 401–425. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/10999922.2021.1881299
Stowe, K., Beck, N., & Gurevych, I. (2021, November). Exploring metaphoric paraphrase generation. In Proceedings of the 25th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (pp. 323–336). doi: https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.conll-1.26
Vernillo, P. (2021). Grounding abstract concepts in action: Semantic analysis of four Italian action verbs encoding force events. In Bechberger, L., Kühnberger, KU., Liu, M. (Eds.), Concepts in Action: Representation, Learning, and Application (pp. 167–194). doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69823-2_8
2020
Abdo, M. S., Alghonaim, A. S., & Essam, B. A. (2021). Public perception of COVID-19’s global health crisis on Twitter until 14 weeks after the outbreak. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 36(3), 509-524. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqaa037
Aseh, F. M. (2020). Outer and inner circle rhetoric specificity in political discourse: a corpus-based study. PhD Dissertation, Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. https://doi.org/10.17904/ku.opus-602
Busso, L., & Tordini, O. (2021). “Ricostruire senza Macerie”: la crisi sanitaria da Covid-19 nel linguaggio giornalistico italiano tra Fase 1 e Fase 2. “Ricostruire senza Macerie”: la crisi sanitaria da Covid-19 nel linguaggio giornalistico italiano tra Fase 1 e Fase 2., 45-66. https://www.torrossa.com/en/resources/an/5046017
Skrynnikova, I. V. (2020). Analogical reasoning in uncovering the meaning of digital-technology terms: the case of backdoor. Journal of Computer-Assisted Linguistic Research, 4, 23-46. doi: https://doi.org/10.4995/jclr.2020.12921
Wicke, P., & Bolognesi, M. M. (2020). Framing COVID-19: How we conceptualize and discuss the pandemic on Twitter. PloS one, 15(9), e0240010. doi: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0240010
2019
Despot, K., Tonković, M., Essert, M., Brdar, M., Perak, B., Anić, A. O., Nahod, B., & I. Pandžić. (2019). MetaNet.HR. In M. Bolognesi, M. Brdar, & K. Despot (Eds.), Metaphor and metonymy in the digital age: Theory and methods for building repositories of figurative language (pp. 123–146). John Benjamins. doi: https://doi.org/10.1075/milcc.8.06des
Lin, T. (2019). Automatic Classification of Verb-Direction Constructions in Mandarin Chinese. PhD Dissertation, University of Colorado at Boulder. https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/jw827c71w
Rajeg, G. P. W. (2019). Metaphorical profiles and near-synonyms: A corpus-based study of Indonesian words for HAPPINESS. PhD Dissertation, Monash University. https://bridges.monash.edu/articles/thesis/Metaphorical_profiles_and_near-synonyms_A_corpus-based_study_of_Indonesian_words_for_HAPPINESS/7968002
Skrynnikova, I. V. (2019). Crosslinguistic Repository of Political Metaphors: Structure and Methodological Issues. Vestnik Volgogradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Seriya 2. Yazykoznanie, 128-146. doi: https://doi.org/10.15688/jvolsu2.2019.2.12
2018
Arenas, E. S., & Essam, B. A. (2018). Cognitive exploration of ‘Traveling’ in the poetry of Widad Benmoussa. East European Journal of Psycholinguistics, 5(2), 6-15. doi: https://doi.org/10.29038/eejpl.2018.5.2.are
Dorr, B., & Olsen, M. (2018, June). Lexical conceptual structure of literal and metaphorical spatial language: A case study of “push”. In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Spatial Language Understanding (pp. 31-40). https://aclanthology.org/W18-1404/
Gangemi, A., Alam, M., & Presutti, V. (2018, September). Amnestic forgery: An ontology of conceptual metaphors. In Formal Ontology in Information Systems: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference (FOIS 2018) (pp. 159–172). doi: https://doi.org/10.3233/978-1-61499-910-2-159
Gangemi, A., Alam, M., & Presutti, V. (2018, October). Linked metaphors. 17th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2018). https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02080226
Gonçalves, J., Martins, P., & Cardoso, A. (2018). Drilling knowledge bases for hidden frames. In TriCoLore 2018 Joint Proceedings of the Workshops, vol. 2347. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2347/paper5.pdf
2015
Lederer, J. (2015). Assessing claims of metaphorical salience through corpus data. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1255–1261). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5bb08168