The MetaID procedure is an annotation protocol for identifying and tagging metaphorical expressions in the Hungarian language. This method is based primarily on the MIPVU (Metaphor Identification Procedure VU University Amsterdam) procedure, but modifies and further develops it to enable the exploration of metaphoricity in expressions with rich morphology in the Hungarian language, and to extend it to expressions larger than words. The MetaID procedure adopts the MIPVU protocol in the following ways:

• it interprets metaphor as a relationship between basic meaning and contextual meaning, motivated by cross-domain mappings;
• it applies the dictionary-based method of sense disambiguation to identify metaphors, i.e., it defines the basic and contextual meanings based on dictionary entries;
• it adopts the categories of the original procedure (metaphor-related expressions, direct metaphors, implicit metaphors, metaphor flags).

However, it departs from the original protocol in the following respects:

• it considers the morpheme rather than the lexical unit as the basic unit of analysis and introduces the categories of inflectional metaphor and metaphor-related components;
• it extends the scope of identification to multi-word expressions and introduces the category of metaphor-related arguments;
• it measures the idiomatic nature of metaphoricity based on the strength of collocation (examined in a  reference corpus) and introduces categories of idiomatic metaphors;
• it strictly distinguishes between metaphors and other indirect meanings and does not apply the WIDLII (“when in doubt leave it in”) category.

The MetaID method is the result of several years of research, during which we tested the reliability of the method and the degree of agreement between annotators in pilot projects and small-scale annotations. Based on the results of the tests, we refined the method in several steps and implemented it on the WebAnno and then the INCEpTION annotation platforms.

Related papers

• Simon, Gábor – Bajzát, Tímea – Ballagó, Júlia – Havasi, Zsuzsanna – K. Molnár, Emese – Szlávich, Eszter: When MIPVU Goes to No Man’s Land: A New Language Resource for Hybrid, Morpheme-based Metaphor Identification in Hungarian. Language Resource and Evaluation 57 (4).
• Simon, Gábor – Bajzát, Tímea Borbála – Ballagó, Júlia – Hauber, Kitti – Havasi, Zsuzsanna – Szlávich, Eszter: Az igealak köré szerveződő metaforák szerkezeti sajátosságai. [Structural characteristics of metaphors organized around verb forms] In: Simon, Gábor – Tolcsvai Nagy Gábor (ed.): Nyelvtan, diskurzus, megismerés. [Grammar, Discourse, and Cognition] Budapest: ELTE Eötvös Kiadó. 2020: 245–270.
• Simon, Gábor – Bajzát, Tímea – Ballagó, Júlia – Havasi, Zsuzsanna – Roskó, Míra – Szlávich, Eszter: Metaforaazonosítás magyar nyelvű szövegekben: egy módszer adaptálásáról. [Metaphor identification in Hungarian texts: adapting a method] Magyar Nyelvőr 143: 223–247. (2019)
• Havasi, Zsuzsanna 2023. Metaforikus kifejezések azonosítása szövegértés vizsgafeladatokban. [Identifying metaphorical expressions in reading comprehension exam questions] Alkalmazott Nyelvtudomány 2023/3. 125-142.

Papers reviewing the MetaID protocol:

• Attila Cserép: Theoretical and methodological issues in the identification of metaphorical language. Review of Cognitive Linguistics (2026), https://benjamins.com/catalog/rcl.00251.cse