29 September 2026 to 3 October 2026
OeAW Main Seat
Europe/Vienna timezone

Towards a Repository of Similes in Contemporary Serbian

1 Oct 2026, 17:00
30m
02 | Museumszimmer (02 | Museumszimmer, OeAW Main Seat, 2nd floor)

02 | Museumszimmer

02 | Museumszimmer, OeAW Main Seat, 2nd floor

Austrian Academy of Sciences Dr. Ignaz Seipel-Platz 2 1010 Vienna

Speakers

Aleksandra Marković (Institute for the Serbian Language) Cvetana Krstev (JeRTeh Society) Milica Dinić Marinković (University of Belgrade - Faculty of Philology) Ranka Stanković (University of Belgrade, Faculty of Mining and Geology)

Description

This paper presents the methodological framework for building the Similes Repository for Contemporary Serbian (Simili-SR), a corpus-based linguistic resource designed for the collection, annotation, and analysis of similes in contemporary Serbian. The study presents a multi-stage extraction and validation pipeline based on the genre-balanced corpus SrpKor2021+ of the Reference Corpus of Contemporary Serbian, combining CQL queries, local grammars implemented in UNITEX, and LLM-assisted semantic annotation. The initial extraction phase produced 574,195 candidate sentences across six major simile patterns, confirming both the productivity and structural diversity of simile constructions in Serbian. Subsequent rule-based filtering and LLM-assisted validation substantially reduced noise while preserving a large pool of linguistically relevant figurative comparisons. Manual evaluation performed on a stratified sample additionally revealed that simile interpretation frequently involves distributed semantic structure, and complex interactions between grammatical realization and figurative meaning, and highlighted the importance of linguistic post-processing, as well as several challenges related to semantic annotation in morphologically rich languages such as Serbian. By combining rule-based methods, LLMs, and detailed linguistic analysis, the paper contributes to both the development of computational resources for Serbian and broader research on figurative language annotation and representation.

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