Computational Approaches to the Detection of Lesser-Known Rhetorical Figures: A Systematic Survey and Research Challenges
Ramona Kühn, Jelena Mitrović, Michael Granitzer · ACM Computing Surveys · 2025
Rhetorical figures play a major role in everyday communication, making text and speech more interesting, memorable, or persuasive through their association between form and meaning. Computational detection of rhetorical figures plays an important part in thorough understanding of complex communication patterns. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of computational approaches to lesser-known rhetorical figures. We explore the linguistic and computational perspectives on rhetorical figures and highlight their significance in the field of Natural Language Processing. We present different figures in detail and investigate datasets, definitions, rhetorical functions, and detection approaches. We identify challenges such as dataset scarcity, language limitations, and reliance on rule-based methods.