Domain-transcending mappings in a system for metaphorical reasoning

Abstract

We illustrate how the use of metaphorical views for reasoning with metaphor requires the mapping of information such as event shape, event rate and mental/emotional states from the source domain to the target domain. Such mappings are domain-independent and can be implemented by means of rules we call View Neutral Mapping Adjuncts (VNMAs). We give a list of the main VNMAs that appear to be required, and show how they can be incorporated into a pre-existing system (ATT-Meta) for metaphorical reasoning.

Textual entailment as an evaluation framework for metaphor resolution

“…Fass, 1997;Falkenhainer et al, 1989;Martin, 1990;Barnden et al, 2003). However, metaphor in particular and figurative language in general suffers a chronic lack of shared resources for proper evaluation of systems (Markert and Nissim, 2007).…”

Developments in affect detection in e-drama

“…Mayid then said "I'll knock your topping off, Lisa" -a theoretically intriguing spontaneous creative elaboration of the 'pizza' metaphor. Our developing approach to metaphor handling in the affect detection module is partly to look for stock metaphorical phraseology and straightforward variants of it, and partly to use a simple version of the more open-ended, reasoning-based techniques taken from the ATT-Meta project (Barnden et al, 2002;2003;. ATT-Meta includes a general-purpose reasoning engine, and can potentially be used to reason about emotion in relation to other factors in a situation.…”

On the formalization of invariant mappings for metaphor interpretation

“…The reasoning connects unmapped ideas used by utterances, such as wheels and starving, to other source-domain ideas for which a mapping is already known. These known mappings may be constituents of particular metaphorical view, but previous work (Barnden et al, 2003; has shown evidence that there are metaphorical aspects (such as causal relations between events) that, subject to being called, invariantly map from source to target (we call these mappings View-Neutral Mapping Adjuncts or VNMAs) irrespective of whatever specific metaphorical views are in play. These allow many mapping effects, which would otherwise have to be duplicated across all view-specific mappings, to be factored out into separate mappings.…”