How to Record the Meaning of Figurative Language

Linguistic Issues in Language Technology – LiLT Volume 10, Issue 3 2015 How to Record the Meaning of Figurative Language Indrek Jentson Published by CSLI Publications LiLT volume 10, issue 3 2015 How to Record the Meaning of Figurative Language Indrek Jentson, University of Tartu This paper focuses on the question of what kind of data needs to be recorded about figurative language, in order to capture the essential meaning of the text and to enable us to re-create a synonymous text, based on that data. A short review of the best known systems of semantic annotation will be presented and their suitability for the task will be analyzed. Also, a method that could be used for representing the meaning of the idioms, metaphors and metonymy in the data model will be considered. 1 Introduction Imagine an interlingual machine translation system. This sort of system sees a text written in some natural language as input and converts it to data that ideally contains all the necessary information about the meaning of the text in input and no longer depends on the language of the text. Based on a previously compiled dataset, the system then generates an equivalent text in another (or - why not? - the same) natural language. From a purely technological point of view, we can - in the context of the described MT system âĂŞ say that the interlingua and the dataset of meaning representation are equal, whereas there is no actual reason to insist that the format of the dataset must be human-readable. In the light of the current article I would like to point out that it is possible view the formalism of the meaning representation completely separately from the semantic analysis process. In the present case we will concentrate first and foremost on the aspect of the meaning representation itself, setting aside the question of how to extract the 1 LiLT Volume 10, Issue 3, 2015. How to Record the Meaning of Figurative Language. Copyright c ⃝ 2015, CSLI Publications. 2 / LiLT volume 10, issue 3 2015 meaning from the text and how to generate a text based on the given representation of the meaning. A lot of work has been done during the last decade to realize an interlingua-type system like this, but the target has usually been set to processing a simple unequivocal text and handling figurative language has been left out of scope. This trend is not justified as, for example, metaphors are often unconsciously used in everyday language (Lakoff and Johnson, 2008). Now, to look at the reasons why this processing of the text containing figurative language is inconvenient, it should be noted that, in addition to a variety of problems that emerge in the course of analysis, it is not clear how to formally present ambiguous or figurative language and what could be done to improve the situation. 2 The existing formalisms Below we will take a look at the systems available for present the mean- ing of …

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