Abstract: The research of metaphors is an important branch of natural language processing. People have realized that metaphors have taken a central position in thoughts and language. From the view of computational linguistics and natural language processing, language understanding and machine translation would be affected badly if the problem of metaphor was not well dealt with. I}hrough observing the context of metaphorial and non-metaphorial phrases respectively,we found that some words can be used to identify metaphorial phrases effectively from Chiese phrases and we call these words distinction words. In this paper, we extracted a number of distinction word form the Web, and then proposed a distiction word based method for recognizing metaphorial phrases. Experimental results show the effectivity of our method.

Key words: Metaphor recognition, Chinese metaphorical phrase, Natural language understanding