The Hamburg Metaphor Database

This article presents the Hamburg Metaphor Database project, an online database of French and German metaphors which came into being in 2002. In this database, metaphors appearing in different domain-specific corpora collected from mass media are available. The metaphors are annotated with lexical and conceptual information according to standard resources of the field: the EuroWordNet database for lexical information (synonyms) and the Berkeley Master Metaphor List for conceptual information (conceptual domains). The data collected can be explored for language studies and research via a WWW user interface without charge. It can be used for cross-language comparison of metaphors and the technical as well as the conceptual domains they occur in. We believe that it can also give indications on how lexical resources for Natural Language Processing could deal with metaphor representation in a better way.