Vossian Antonomasia

Frank Fischer, Robert Jäschke, Elena Krotova, Michel Schwab, Jannik Strötgen

Automatic extraction of Vossian antonomasia (VA) from large newspaper corpora. Based on an idea by Frank Fischer (see Der Umblätterer).

Vossian antonomasia is a stylistic device which attributes a certain property to a person by naming another (more well-known, more popular) person as a reference point. For instance, when Jim Koch is described as "the Steve Jobs of Beer", certain qualities of Steve Jobs, be it entrepreneurship or persuasiveness, are assigned to Jim Koch, co-founder and chairman of the Boston Beer Company. VAs consist of three parts: a source (in our example "Steve Jobs") serves as paragon to elevate the target ("Jim Koch") by applying a modifier ("of Beer") that provides the corresponding context. VA is named after Gerardus Vossius (1577–1649), the Dutch classical scholar and author of rhetorical textbooks, who first distinguished and described VA as a separate phenomenon.

Dissertation Michel Schwab (July, 2024)

Schwab, M.: Detection, Extraction and Analysis of Vossian Antonomasia in Large Text Corpora Using Machine Learning. (DOI:10.18452/28987, PDF BibTeX)

ICNLSP (December, 2023)

Schwab, M., Jäschke, R., Fischer, F.: “Japan’s Answer to Mozart”: Automatic Detection of Generalized Patterns of Vossian Antonomasia (URL, PDF, BibTeX)

SIGHUM (May, 2023)

Schwab, M., Jäschke, R., Fischer, F.: “Who is the Madonna of Italian-American Literature?”: Extracting and Analyzing Target Entities of Vossian Antonomasia. (PDF, BibTeX)

• Slides SIGHUM 2023, Dubrovnik
• Data and code
• Visualization of Source-Target pairs (recommended)

DHd (March, 2023)

Schwab, M., Fischer, F.: »Die Greta Garbo der Leichtathletik«. Eine systematische Analyse der Modifier vossianischer Antonomasien mithilfe von Word Embeddings. (DOI:10.5281/zenodo.7715490, PDF, BibTeX)

• Slides DHd 2023, Trier (in German)
• Data and code
• Visualization of modifiers (recommended)
• Twitter thread

ICNLSP (December, 2022)

Schwab, M., Jäschke, R., Fischer, F.: “Der Frank Sinatra der Wettervorhersage”: Cross-Lingual Vossian Antonomasia Extraction. (URL, PDF, BibTeX)

• Slides ICNLSP 2022, online
• Data and code

Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (2022)

Schwab, M., Jäschke, R., Fischer, F.: "The Rodney Dangerfield of Stylistic Devices": End-to-End Detection and Extraction of Vossian Antonomasia Using Neural Networks. (DOI:10.3389/frai.2022.868249, PDF, BibTeX)

• Data

EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 (November, 2019)

Schwab, M., Jäschke, R., Fischer, F., Strötgen, J.: 'A Buster Keaton of Linguistics': First Automated Approaches for the Extraction of Vossian Antonomasia. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing. pp. 6239–6244. Association for Computational Linguistics 2019. (DOI:10.18653/v1/D19-1647, PDF, BibTeX, Poster)

• Timeline (recommended)
• Data and code
• Some statistics
• All found VA

DSH Paper (January, 2019)

Fischer, F., Jäschke, R.: ‘The Michael Jordan of greatness’—Extracting Vossian antonomasia from two decades of The New York Times, 1987–2007. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. 2019. (DOI:10.1093/llc/fqy087, Preprint: arXiv:1902.06428)

• Some more statistics (recommended)
• Complete list of extracted VA (recommended)
• Twitter thread

TheOf Approach (2017–2019)

• Poster Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften (June, 2018)
• Data and code

First Approach (February, 2017)

• Slides DHd 2017, Bern (in German)
• Abstract DHd 2017, Bern (in German)
• Data and code

Further Ressources

• A Bibliography of Related Publications
• A Poster About a Vossanto Memory Game (in German)
• VA Detection Model on HuggingFace