We introduce a new task in hyperbole processing, deexaggeration, which concerns the recovery of the meaning of what is being exaggerated in a hyperbolic sentence in the form of a structured representation. In this paper, we lay the groundwork for the computational study of understanding hyperbole by (1) defining a structured representation to encode what is being exaggerated in a hyperbole in a non-hyperbolic manner, (2) annotating the hyperbolic sentences in two existing datasets, HYPO and HYPO-cn, using this structured representation, (3) conducting an empirical analysis of our annotated corpora, and (4) presenting preliminary results on the deexaggeration task.