This approach makes the task comparable to classic word sense disambiguation (WSD), which is also concerned with distinguishing between possible word senses/interpretations.
whereas a classic (supervised) WSD algorithm is trained on a set of labelled instances of one particular word and assigns word senses to new test instances of the same word, (supervised) metonymy recognition can be trained on a set of labelled instances of different words of one semantic class and assign literal readings and metonymic patterns to new test instances of possibly different words of the same semantic class.