A is the B of C: (Semi)-Automatic Creation of Vossian Antonomasias

Abstract

A Vossian Antonomasia (VA) is a stylistic device used to describe a person (or, more generally, an entity) in terms of a well-known person and a modifying context. For instance, the Norwegian chess world champion Magnus Carlsen was described as “the Mozart of chess” [1 ]. All VAs follow the pattern where a source (e.g., “Mozart”), is used to describe a target, (e.g., “Magnus Carlsen”), and the transfer of meaning is “channeled” through the use of the modifier “of chess”. Although this rhetorical figure is well-known, there has not yet been a dedicated study of targeted automatic or semi-automatic methods to generate and judge the appropriateness of VAs using large Knowledge Graphs (KGs) such as Wikidata. In our work, we propose the use of vector space embeddings – both KG-based and text-based – for producing VAs. For comparison, we contrast our findings with a purely LLM-based approach, wherein VAs are obtained from ChatGPT using a reasonably engineered prompt. We provide a publicly available GitHub repository1 for the implementation of our method and a website2 that allows testing the proposed methods.