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Tony Veale

University College Dublin, Computer Science and Informatics, Faculty Member

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Web Science and Technology, Faculty Member

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Address: School of Computer Science and Informatics. University College Dublin, Belfield Dublin D4, Ireland

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Papers by Tony Veale

Belief Modelling, Intentionality and Perlocution in Metaphor Comprehension

Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2019

The view that metaphor plays a fundamental structural role in organizing our conceptual systems, ... more The view that metaphor plays a fundamental structural role in organizing our conceptual systems, rather than serving a deviant rhetorical effect, is now generally accepted. Indeed, this idea drives many recent computational models (Weiner , 1984; Martin, 1990; Way, 1991;Veale & Keane, 1992a, 1992b). However, these analyses are based on the de-contextualised "contents" of the metaphor and ignore the communicative context in which it is uttered. Additionally, Davidson (1979) has warned against confusing the content of a metaphor with the intended effect of a metaphor. In his view, metaphor is not a carrier of meaning, but a recipe from which meaning is constructed. The real meaning of a metaphor lies in the changes it makes to belief structures of the hearer/reader.

From Conceptual Mash-ups to Bad-ass Blends: A Robust Computational Model of Conceptual Blending

Conceptual blending is a complex cognitive phenomenon whose instances range from the humdrum to t... more Conceptual blending is a complex cognitive phenomenon whose instances range from the humdrum to the pyrotechnical. Most remarkable of all is the ease with which we humans regularly understand and produce complex blends. While this facility will doubtless elude our best efforts at computational modeling for some time to come, there are practical forms of conceptual blending that are amenable to computational exploitation right now. In this chapter we introduce the notion of a conceptual mash-up, a robust form of blending that allows a computer to creatively reuse and extend its existing commonsense knowledge of a topic. We show also how a repository of such knowledge can be harvested automatically from the web, by targeting the casual questions that we pose to ourselves and to others every day. By acquiring its world knowledge from the questions of others, a computer can eventually learn to pose introspective questions of its own, in the service of its own creative mash-ups.

The Soul of a New Cliché: Conventions and Meta-Conventions in the Creative Linguistic Variation of Familiar Forms

EPiC Series in Computing

Creativity – whether in humans or machines – is more than a matter of simple creation. To be “cre... more Creativity – whether in humans or machines – is more than a matter of simple creation. To be “creative” implies an ability to do more than invent, but an ability to recognize and appreciate the inventions of others. After all, the ability to recognize surprising value in the efforts of others is the same ability we use to guide our own creative efforts. Solipsistic creativity is rare indeed, and most creativity relies on an audience that is creative enough to value our efforts. Of what value is an ability to e.g. speak ironically if we cannot also understand or appreciate the irony of others? The goal of imbuing computers with creative abilities must thus include a sub-goal of enabling computers to recognize and respond appropriately to the creativity of others. As computers are increasingly used to analyze the burgeoning texts of the world-wide-web, the ability to automatically detect and analyze the linguistic creativity of speakers has become more important than ever. In this pap...

Exploding the Creativity Myth: The Computational Foundations of Linguistic Creativity by Tony Veale

Metaphor and Symbol, 2017

Round Up The Usual Suspects: Knowledge-Based Metaphor Generation

Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Metaphor in NLP, 2016

The elasticity of metaphor as a communication strategy has spurred philosophers to question its a... more The elasticity of metaphor as a communication strategy has spurred philosophers to question its ability to mean anything at all. If a metaphor can elicit different responses from different people in varying contexts, how can one say it has a single meaning? Davidson has argued that metaphors have no special or secondary meaning, and must thus mean exactly what they seem to mean on the surface. It is this literally anomalous meaning that directs us to the pragmatic inferences that a speaker actually wishes us to explore. Conveniently, this laissez faire strategy assumes that metaphors are crafted from apt knowledge by speakers with real communicative intent, allowing useful inference to be extracted from their words. But this assumption is not valid in the case of many machine-generated metaphors that merely echo the linguistic form-but lack the actual substance-of real metaphors. We present here an open public resource with which a metaphor-generation system can give its figurative efforts real meaning.

Twitter: The Best of Bot Worlds for Automated Wit

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2015

ABSTRACT Language affords a great many opportunities for the intelligent reuse of linguistic cont... more ABSTRACT Language affords a great many opportunities for the intelligent reuse of linguistic content. Rather than always putting our own thoughts into our own words, we often convey feelings through the words of others, by citing, quoting, mimicking, borrowing, varying or ironically echoing what others have already said. Social networking platforms such as Twitter elevate linguistic reuse into an integral norm of digital interaction. On such platforms, who you follow and what you re-tweet can say as much about you as the clothes you wear or the art you hang on your walls. But not everyone that is worth following is human, and not everything that is worth re-tweeting was first coined by a real person. More and more of the witty and thought-provoking content on Twitter is generated by bots, artificial systems that write their own material and vie for our attention just as humans do. Real people knowingly follow artificial bots for reasons that are subtle and diverse, but a significant reason is surely Twitter itself. This paper explores Twitter as a smart environment for automated wit, and describes the mechanics of a wittily inventive new Twitterbot named @MetaphorMagnet. 1 We Can (Re)Tweet It For You Wholesale The limitations on text length imposed by micro-blogging services such as Twitter do nothing to dampen our ardour for creative language. Indeed, such limitations further incentivize the use of creative devices such as metaphor, analogy and irony, as forms such as these allow us to interact in ways that are witty, memorable and concise. As a principally textual medium, Twitter supports all of the same compression strategies as written language, but also adds some that are uniquely its own. Hashtags, for instance, allow their originators to crystalize an emerging topic or movement into a single term, thus allowing followers to hop onto an ever-accelerating bandwagon by appending the hashtag du jour – such as #CancelColbert or #GamerGate – to their tweets. Twitter also encourages its users to reuse, re-purpose and disseminate the tweets of others via a simple re-tweeting mechanism. Re-tweeting is an action that creates added value for the originator of a tweet and those that pass it along: for the former, it allows their texts to reach a wider audience, and of latter it makes content intermediaries who – as self-appointed social sensors – interactively filter what is worthy of greater attention. More and more, however, the texts that are so anointed by successive re-tweeting are not the texts of human writers but of artificial content-producers called Twitterbots.

Creativity as a Web Service: A Vision of Human and Computer Creativity in the Web Era

The marketplace for definitions and theories of creativity is crowded indeed. No hard consensus e... more The marketplace for definitions and theories of creativity is crowded indeed. No hard consensus exists on the elements of an all-embracing theory, or on what specific sub-processes and representations are required to support creativity, either in humans or in machines. Yet commonalities do exist across theories: a search for novelty and utility is implied by most theories, as is the notion that an innovation can be considered creative only if it is not too novel, and can be adequately grounded in the familiar and the understandable. Computational creativity (CC) is the pursuit of creative behavior in machines, and seeks inspiration from both AI and from human psychology. As a practical engineering endeavor, CC can afford to adopt a cafeteria approach to theories of creativity, taking what it needs from different theories and frameworks. In this paper we present a vision for CC research in the age of the Web, in which CC is provided on tap, via a suite of Web services, to any third-party application that needs it. We argue that this notion of Creativity as a Service-which is already a popular business model for human organizations-will allow CC researchers and developers to build ad-hoc mash-ups of whatever processes and representations are most suited to a given application. By offering CC as a centralized service, we can collect statistics on the most useful mash-ups, and therein obtain a new empirical basis for theorizing about creativity in humans and in machines. The Creative Web 1 Creativity is an elusive phenomenon that organizations put significant effort and resources into fostering, rewarding, retaining, and reproducing on demand. But the systematic harnessing of creativity is complicated by the complex and definition-defying nature of the phenomenon, and the realization that it depends crucially on so many different social, cultural and

A World With or Without You*(* Terms and Conditions May Apply)

ABSTRACT We all share the same world, but are free to formulate and argue for our own interpretat... more ABSTRACT We all share the same world, but are free to formulate and argue for our own interpretations of this shared reality. For different agents will grant differing degrees of importance to the same facts and norms. We cannot experiment on human cultures the way scientists experiment on cell cultures, but we can construct thought experiments that imagine the consequences of otherwise impossible changes. Successful thought experiments do not change the world, but change the way we see the world. This paper describes Gedanken-style reasoning in an AI system that allows a computer to understand, or at least speculate on, the surprising causal interactions between apparently unrelated concepts. This system ponders alternate worlds in which the amount of a conceptual ingredient [X] is increased or decreased, to see what unexpected and apparently incongruous effects might arise from this change. Our goal is to construct a creative generator of novel what-if scenarios that can be used in the generation of perspective-shaping stories, poems and jokes.

Computability as a limiting cognitive constraint

Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 1999

The Agile Cliché: Using Flexible Stereotypes as Building Blocks in the Construction of an Affective Lexicon

Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing, 2012

Our affective perspective on a word is heavily influenced by the context in which it is used and ... more Our affective perspective on a word is heavily influenced by the context in which it is used and by the features it is typically perceived to exhibit in that context. A nuanced model of lexical affect thus requires a feature-rich representation of each word's potential to mean different things in different contexts. To this end, we present here a two-level model of lexical affect. At the first level, words are represented as bundles of the typical properties and behaviors they are commonly shown to exhibit in everyday language. To construct these bundles, we present a semi-automatic approach to harvesting stereotypical properties and behaviors from the Web. At the second level, these properties and behaviors are related to each other in a graph structure that captures how likely one is to reinforce the meaning of another. We present an effective means of constructing such a graph from a combination of text n-grams and queries to the open Web. We calculate positive and negative potentials for each property in the graph, and show how these potentials can be used in turn to calculate an overall affective value for the higher-level terms for which they are considered stereotypical.

Growing finely-discriminating taxonomies from seeds of varying quality and size

Proceedings of the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics on - EACL '09, 2009

Concept taxonomies offer a powerful means for organizing knowledge, but this organization must al... more Concept taxonomies offer a powerful means for organizing knowledge, but this organization must allow for many overlapping and fine-grained perspectives if a general-purpose taxonomy is to reflect concepts as they are actually employed and reasoned about in everyday usage. We present here a means of bootstrapping finely-discriminating taxonomies from a variety of different starting points, or seeds, that are acquired from three different sources: WordNet, ConceptNet and the web at large.

The Challenge of Creative Information Retrieval

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2004

Information retrieval (IR) is an effective mechanism for text management that has received widesp... more Information retrieval (IR) is an effective mechanism for text management that has received widespread adoption in the world at large. But it is not a particularly creative mechanism, in the sense of creating new conceptual structures or reorganizing existing ones to pull in documents that describe, in novel and inventive ways, a user's information needs. Since language is a dynamic and highly creative medium of expression, the concepts that one seeks will therefore represent a moving target for IR systems. We argue that only by thinking creatively can an IR system effectively retrieve documents that express themselves creatively.

A fluid knowledge representation for understanding and generating creative metaphors

Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics - COLING '08, 2008

Creative metaphor is a phenomenon that stretches and bends the conventions of semantic descriptio... more Creative metaphor is a phenomenon that stretches and bends the conventions of semantic description, often to humorous and poetic extremes. The computational modelling of metaphor thus requires a knowledge representation that is just as stretchable and semantically accommodating. We present here a flexible knowledge representation for metaphor interpretation and generation, called Talking Points, and describe how talking points can be acquired on a large scale from WordNet and from the web. We show how talking points can be fluidly connected to form a slipnet, and demonstrate that talking points provide an especially concise representation for concepts in general.

Creative discovery in lexical ontologies

Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Computational Linguistics - COLING '04, 2004

Compound terms play a surprisingly key role in the organization of lexical ontologies. However, t... more Compound terms play a surprisingly key role in the organization of lexical ontologies. However, their inclusion forces one to address the issues of completeness and consistency that naturally arise from this organizational role. In this paper we show how creative exploration in the space of literal compounds can reveal not only additional compound terms to systematically balance an ontology, but can also discover new and potentially innovative concepts in their own right.

Systematicity and the lexicon in creative metaphor

Proceedings of the ACL 2003 workshop on Lexicon and figurative language -, 2003

Aptness is an umbrella term that covers a multitude of issues in the interpretation and generatio... more Aptness is an umbrella term that covers a multitude of issues in the interpretation and generation of creative metaphor. In this paper we concentrate on one of these issues-the notion of lexical systematicity-and explore its role in ascertaining the coherence of creative metaphor relative to the structure of the target concept being described. We argue that all else being equal, the most apt metaphors are those that resonate most with the way the target concept is literally and metaphorically organized. As such, the lexicon plays a key role in enforcing and recognizing aptness, insofar as this existing organization will already have been lexicalized. We perform our exploration in the context of WordNet, and describe how relational structures can be automatically extracted from this lexical taxonomy to facilitate the interpretation of creative metaphors.

Exploiting Syntactic and Shallow Semantic Kernels to Improve Random Walks for Complex Question Answering

2008 20th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence, 2008

We consider the problem of answering complex questions that require inferencing and synthesizing ... more We consider the problem of answering complex questions that require inferencing and synthesizing information from multiple documents and can be seen as a kind of topicoriented, informative multi-document summarization. The stochastic, graph-based method for computing the relative importance of textual units (i.e. sentences) is very successful in generic summarization. In this method, a sentence is encoded as a vector in which each component represents the occurrence frequency (TF*IDF) of a word. However, the major limitation of the TF*IDF approach is that it only retains the frequency of the words and does not take into account the sequence, syntactic and semantic information. In this paper, we study the impact of syntactic and shallow semantic information in the graph-based method for answering complex questions. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the syntactic and shallow semantic information for this task.

Talking Points in Metaphor: A Concise Usage-based Representation for Figurative Processing

An effective speaker can use metaphor to communi- cate a wealth of propositions and affective att... more An effective speaker can use metaphor to communi- cate a wealth of propositions and affective attitudes with a single juxtaposition of ideas (12,8,6,10,7,3,15). But as such, an effective metaphor requires effective communication, which in turn requires that the speaker has a clear idea of the content to be communicated, and an equally clear understanding of which conceptual vehicles best communicate

An Ironic Fist in a Velvet Glove: Creative Mis-Representation in the Construction of Ironic Similes

Minds and Machines, 2010

Irony is an effective but challenging mode of communication that allows a speaker to express sent... more Irony is an effective but challenging mode of communication that allows a speaker to express sentiment-rich viewpoints with concision, sharpness and humour. Creative irony is especially common in online documents that express subjective and deeply-felt opinions, and thus represents a significant obstacle to the accurate analysis of sentiment in web texts. In this paper we look at one commonly used framing device for linguistic irony-the simile-to show how even the most creative uses of irony are often marked in ways that make them computationally feasible to detect. We conduct a very large corpus analysis of web-harvested similes to identify the most interesting characteristics of ironic comparisons, and provide an empirical evaluation of a new algorithm for separating ironic from non-ironic similes.

An analogy-oriented type hierarchy for linguistic creativity

Knowledge-Based Systems, 2006

Metaphor and analogy are perhaps the most challenging aspects of linguistic creativity for a conc... more Metaphor and analogy are perhaps the most challenging aspects of linguistic creativity for a conceptual representation to facilitate, since by their very nature they seek to stretch the boundaries of domain description and dynamically establish new ways of determining inter-domain similarity. By solving the vexing representational problems posed by these phenomena, we can create a more fluid conceptual organization that is more suited to creative processing in general. Toward this end, this paper considers the problem of how a conceptual system structured around a central taxonomy can dynamically create new categories or types to understand creative metaphors and analogies. We demonstrate that the conventional wisdom regarding metaphor and analogy-that such processes are creative because clever word-play is indicative of an underlying mental agility and suppleness of conceptual structure-also withstands theoretical scrutiny when considered from the perspective of current creativity research.

A context-sensitive framework for lexical ontologies

The Knowledge Engineering Review, 2008

Human categorization is neither a binary nor a context-free process. Rather, the criteria that go... more Human categorization is neither a binary nor a context-free process. Rather, the criteria that govern the use and recognition of certain concepts may be satisfied to different degrees in different contexts. In light of this reality, the idealized, static structure of a lexical-ontology like WordNet appears both excessively rigid and unduly fragile when faced with real texts that draw upon different contexts to communicate different world-views. In this paper we describe a syntagmatic, corpus-based approach to redefining the concepts of a lexical-ontology like WordNet in a functional, gradable and context-sensitive fashion. We describe how the most diagnostic properties of concepts, on which these functional definitions are based, can be automatically acquired from the Web, and demonstrate how these properties are more predictive of how concepts are actually used and perceived than properties derived from other sources (such as WordNet itself).