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Creative language explorations through a high-expressivity N-grams query language

In computation linguistics a combination of syntagmatic and paradigmatic features is often exploited. While the first aspects are typically managed by information present in large n-gram databases, domain and ontological aspects are more properly modeled by lexical ontologies such as WordNet and semantic similarity spaces. This interconnection is even stricter when we are dealing with creative language phenomena, such as metaphors, prototypical properties, puns generation, hyperbolae and other rhetorical phenomena. This paper describes a way to focus on and accomplish some of these tasks by exploiting NgramQuery, a generalized query language on Google N-gram database. The expressiveness of this query language is boosted by plugging semantic similarity acquired both from corpora (e.g. LSA) and from WordNet, also integrating operators for phonetics and sentiment analysis. The paper reports a number of examples of usage in some creative language tasks.