Metallel: An Integrated Approach to Non‐literal Phrase Interpretation1

Abstract

Metallel is a program that incorporates marker passing techniques within a preferenceicollative semantics framework. This allows for the simultaneous generation of literal and non-literal meaning representations, while allowing for a much greater degree of parallelism during processing. In addition, we have integrated metonymic and metaphoric inferencing into one procedure, arguing that at least some types of metaphor can be represented as parallel metonymies. A number of examples are presented which show that metallel's output is roughly equivalent to conventional, rule-based approaches to metonymy.

Large neural networks for the resolution of lexical ambiguity

“…Other kinds of information could be added to the network with low processing cost. For example, the network could be augmented to provide information about genus relations, which several studies have shown to be of special importance for language understanding and disambiguation (Fass, 1988;Iverson and Helmreich, 1992;McRoy, 1992). In our network, links between a sense and a genus word appearing in its definition could be more heavily weighted, in order to make them bear more importance in the process of sense identification.…”

Metonymy

“…We think that these basic heuristics are a good starting point for more sophisticated approaches to translation in a multilingual environment. We intend as our next step to implement our ideas using existing systems such as the ULTRA MT system (Wilks and Farwell 1990) and the Metallel metonymic analysis program (Iverson and Helmreich 1992).…”

“…We intend as our next step to implement our ideas using existing systems such as the ULTRA MT system (Wilks and Farwell 1990) and the Metallel metonymic analysis program (Iverson and Helmreich 1992). …”

“…Even if some language shows the tendency of unacceptability, if one or more languages show acceptance in the group to which the expression belongs to in the result of the survey, the system should accept it for analysis, and come up with some metonymic reading using its inference mechanism (Iverson andHelmreich 1992, Fass 1991). Given such information, the generation component should look at the tendency of each language.…”

Lexical Rules is Italicized

“…Therefore, the lexical item Bach can be taken to refer to Bach's music, given the relevant context: 1 was listening to some Bach last night. This approach has been computationally implemented on a small scale in the Metallel program (Iverson and Helmreich, 1992), a reworking of the meta5 program (Fass, 1988).…”