Metonymic Proper Names: A Corpus-based Account

Many proper names are widely used metonymically. Thus, for example, organisation names can be used for products produced by the organisation, members of an organisation or events associated with the organisation. Their treatment is crucial for many natural language processing tasks like question answering and anaphora resolution. At the moment, language resources do not contain the necessary information for large-scale metonymy processing. As a contribution, we describe a general framework for annotating metonymies in domain- independent text that considers the regularity, productivity and underspecification of metonymic usage. We will then concentrate on two fully worked out annotation schemes for location and organisation names and rigorously evaluate these schemes as to their reliability. We also present a gold standard corpus consisting of 4000 annotated occurrences of location and organisation names in the British National Corpus. We use this corpus to examine the distribution of metonymies as well as for experiments in automatic metonymy resolution.