Round Up The Usual Suspects: Knowledge-Based Metaphor Generation

Why is Artificial Intelligence concerned with metaphor, and what special contributions can AI offer to metaphor research? This chapter will indicate why AI needs to study metaphor and will outline what AI has been contributing to the illumination of metaphor, whether it is processed by artefacts or by the human mind.

2015

Much computational work has been done on identifying and interpreting the mean-ing of metaphors, but little work has been done on understanding the motivation be-hind the use of metaphor. To computation-ally model discourse and social position-ing in metaphor, we need a corpus anno-tated with metaphors relevant to speaker intentions. This paper reports a corpus study as a first step towards computa-tional work on social and discourse func-tions of metaphor. We use Amazon Me-chanical Turk (MTurk) to annotate data from three web discussion forums cover-ing distinct domains. We then compare these to annotations from our own anno-tation scheme which distinguish levels of metaphor with the labels: nonliteral, con-ventionalized, and literal. Our hope is that this work raises questions about what new work needs to be done in order to address the question of how metaphors are used to achieve social goals in interaction. 1

1999

We present an approach to the reasoning needed to handle a class of metaphorical utterances, and a computer program (ATT-Meta) implementing that approach. The approach emanates from artificial intelligence research but is offered also for consideration by cognitive scientists generally. The class includes utterances that exploit familiar conceptual metaphors by going beyond the between-domain mappings they involve. The crux in dealing with such utterances is possibly-extensive inferencing in the terms of the source (vehicle) domain of the conceptual metaphor, and in, generally, avoiding attempts to find or create a targetdomain correspondent for a source-domain concept used in the utterance but not yet mapped to the target by the metaphor. The approach is similar in flavor to those of a small number of other metaphor researchers, but we present new claims and a more extensive implementation. Significant claims arise from our close attention to reasoning uncertainty; notably, we take a distinctive stance on conflicts between metaphorical inferences and target-domain information.

We present and evaluate an approach to the reasoning needed to handle a broad class of metaphorical utterances, and a computer program (ATT-Meta) partially implementing and further specifying that approach.

This paper argues that there need not be a full correspondence between source and target domains when interpreting metaphors. Instead, inference is performed in the source domain, and conclusions transferred to the target. A description of a computer system, ATT-Meta, that partially implements these ideas is provided.

Journal of Literary Semantics, 1999

For a long time, metaphor has been considered "äs a sort of happy extra trick with words" (Richards, 1936: 90)-a device of the poetic Imagination in which the poet coats his feelings to bestow on the language in which they are wrapped a touch of beauty or unfamiliarity. Accordingly, it has been relegated within this tradition to an ancillary function of mere embellishment. It is only in the early 1970s that its Status started to be rethought, thanks to the progress made in the fields of the philosophy of language, psychology, linguistics, stylistics, discourse analysis, and pragmatics. This period has actually witnessed a proliferation of symposia and publications such äs Black's Models and Metaphors (1962), Shibles's Metaphor. Annotated BMography and History (1971), Sacks's On Metaphor (1979), Ortony's Metaphor and Thought (1979), and Lakoff & Johnson's Metaphors We Live Bj (1980), to name only a few. The outcome of this research has been the questioning of the view of metaphor äs an achievement of the unordinary mind. Hence, it has been claimed that "to be able to produce and understand metaphorical Statements is nothing to boast about" (Black, 1979: 181), and that "children do not learn to speak metaphorically äs a kind of crowning achievement in the apprenticeship of language learning" (Cohen & Margalit, 1972: 723). It has also been claimed that metaphor is not only not a mark of excellence, but also "an incurable infirmity of the human mind" 2 to perceive reality äs it is (Bally: 1951:188). The paper is divided into sections, each studying a pair of dualities. The justification for dealing with metaphor in these terms could be found in the nature of metaphor itself which has been claimed to be "no different from any other kind of duality of meaning" (Morgan, 1979: 139), such äs ambiguity, irony, and indirect Speech acts. The first section will be devoted to dealing with the review of the massive literature about metaphor and the framework. The second section includes the pair imagnation-rationaKty, which is at the heart of metaphor making and processing. The third pair, assertion-speech act, investigates the logical Status of metaphor, and argues that metaphor cannot be approached in terms of truth claims. The fourth couple, convention-intention, seeks to draw a line between what is conventional and what is intentional in metaphor. The fifth, Speaker meaning-sentence meaning exploits the traditional distinction between literal and figurative meaning to show the continuum between the two.

This paper outlines a multi-dimensional/multi-disciplinary framework for the study of metaphor. It expands on the cognitive linguistic approach to metaphor in language and thought by adding the dimension of communication, and it expands on the predominantly linguistic and psychological approaches by adding the discipline of social science. This creates a map of the field in which nine main areas of research can be distinguished and connected to each other in precise ways. It allows for renewed attention to the deliberate use of metaphor in communication, in contrast with non-deliberate use, and asks the question whether the interaction between deliberate and non-deliberate use of metaphor in specific social domains can contribute to an explanation of the discourse career of metaphor. The suggestion is made that metaphorical models in language, thought, and communication can be classified as official, contested, implicit, and emerging, which may offer new perspectives on the interaction between social, psychological, and linguistic properties and functions of metaphor in discourse. Keywords: metaphor, language, thought, communication, linguistics, psychology, social science

2008

Abstract This article comments on some ways in which metaphor is relevant to practical language technology, for either text or speech. While the article mentions some deep problems, it nevertheless points out that certain issues are less troublesome than they might appear to be, and that metaphor in real discourse has some characteristics that could help, rather than hinder, practical discourse-processing.

Metaphor is important in all sorts of mundane discourse [19], [7]: ordinary conversation, news articles, popular novels, advertisements, etc. This presents a challenge to how Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems understand inter-human discourse (e.g. newspaper articles), or produce more naturalseeming language, as most AI research on metaphor has been about its understanding rather than its generation. To redress the balance towards generation of metaphor, we directly tackle the role of AI systems in communication, uniquely combining this with corpus-based results to guide output to more natural forms of expression.

Cognitive Semiotics, 2009

Line Brandt Copenhagen Business School Metaphor and the Communicative Mind On the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the first cognitive-semantic theory of metaphor-Metaphors We Live By (1980)-this paper presents a communication-oriented perspective on the practice of metaphor analysis. Through discussion of contemporary metaphor theories, it identifies a number of unresolved issues. Among these are the notions of domains, mental spaces and binding, the unidirectionality hypothesis, the emergence problem, the significance of pragmatic context, and the philosophical status of representations. The theories discussed are conceptual metaphor theory, conceptual integration theory, the neural theory of language, the attribution model of metaphor, semiotic integration theory, and relevancetheoretic approaches to metaphor including the hybrid theory of metaphor. Comparing analyses and explanatory frameworks, the paper offers a theoretical and methodological critique of these approachesas food for thought and fuel for prospective future research projects in cognitive linguistics and beyond.