PSYMET – METAPHOR ANALYSIS SERVINC PSYCHOLOGICAL COUNSELLING

The research project “PsyMet – Metaphor analysis serving psychological counselling” is carried out at Eötvös Loránd University.

IDENTIFYING THE SOCIAL PROBLEM

The research extends to the collection, digital archiving and corpus linguistic processing of online forum texts in which users express their suicidal intentions and share suicidal thoughts. It aims to identify metaphorical patterns in these texts, which can be used to explore metaphorical markers of suicidal intention.

In the first period of the research, three topics from the psychological support-seeking platform “bura.hu” are sampled (approximately 400 posts altogether). The Metaid Research Group at ELTE Eötvös Loránd University set the identification and analyses of metaphorical structures in Hungarian as an aim. The group adapted the MIPVU method (a widely used procedure in international metaphor research that has been applied to several languages) to Hungarian using it successfully in small and medium-scale annotation projects.

THE EXPECTED SOCIAL/ECONOMIC/ENVINRONMENTAL BENEFITS OF THE RESEARCH

The research will provide a database for organisations involved in suicide prevention: emergency services, crisis foundations, psychological groups, and student support organisations may obtain valuable information from the corpus on typical metaphors related to suicidal ideation. This can help them to identify the reoccurring patterns of figurative language use and to intervene effectively in the day-to-day work. Additional expected utilization of the research corpus is its application as training material for the implementation of automatic metaphor detection, which could become a starting point for further language-specific NLP developments. Finally, researchers interested in the linguistic study of doctor-patient communication and the communication of psychological crisis management can also rely on the corpus in their research.

CONTACT

Gábor SIMON senior lecturer (Faculty of Humanities)
simon.gabor@btk.elte.hu
MTMT