Mining Online Discussion Forums for Metaphors

We present an approach to mining online forums for figurative language such as metaphor. We target in particular online discussions within the illness and the political conflict domains, with a view to constructing corpora of Metaphor in Illness Discussion, and Metaphor in Political Conflict Discussion. This paper reports on our ongoing efforts to combine manual and automatic detection strategies for labelling the corpora, and present some initial results from our work showing that metaphor use is not independent of illness domain.