Lecture Series: Suzanne Mpouli

Suzanne Mpouli is a postdoctoral researcher at the ERIC Lab (Lyon, France) affiliated to the project “Detecting metaphors in scientific discourse”. She became interested in digital humanities and computational rhetoric during her MA in Linguistics at the University of Antwerp. Her PhD thesis, funded by the Labex Observatory of Literary Life (Sorbonne Universités), focused on the automatic annotation of similes in literary texts written in English and in French.

Computing Similes in French and English Literary Texts

Similes such as “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” abound in everyday language and are generally said to be particularly creative as well as stylistically relevant in literary texts.  In her talk, Suzanne will discuss the specificities and challenges related to the automatic detection of similes for literary purposes. To illustrate the interest of this task, she will present as case study the use of colour similes in a corpus of French and British novels published between 1810 and 1950.