A Fluid Knowledge Representation for Understanding and Generating Creative Metaphors

Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2008), pages 945–952 Manchester, August 2008 A Fluid Knowledge Representation for Understanding and Generating Creative Metaphors Tony Veale School of Computer Science University College Dublin Ireland tony.veale@ucd.ie Yanfen Hao School of Computer Science University College Dublin Ireland yanfen.hao@ucd.ie Abstract Creative metaphor is a phenomenon that stretches and bends the conventions of se- mantic description, often to humorous and poetic extremes. The computational mod- eling of metaphor thus requires a knowl- edge representation that is just as stretch- able and semantically accommodating. We present here a flexible knowledge repre- sentation for metaphor interpretation and generation, called Talking Points, and de- scribe how talking points can be acquired on a large scale from WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998) and from the web. We show how talking points can be fluidly connected to form a slipnet, and demonstrate that talk- ing points provide an especially concise representation for concepts in general. 1 Introduction Metaphor serves two important roles in language. The first of these is to make the unfamiliar and the strange seem more familiar and understandable (Indurkhya, 1992). For instance, one might describe a burqa (a full body covering for Muslim women) as a suit of armor, as a shield against prying eyes or, depending on one’s communi- cation goal, as a wearable cage. The other role of metaphor is most often associated with the poetic and fanciful use of language, but is no less important: to make the familiar and mundane seem strange and unfamiliar. In this latter guise, metaphor allows us to view a commonplace idea from a new and revealing category perspective c⃝ 2008. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported li- cense (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/). Some rights reserved. (Camac and Glucksberg, 1984). For instance, one might describe makeup as “the Western burqa”, to communicate not just the idea that each involves a covering of the female form, but that each reflects a society-imposed expectation on the public presentation of women. Each of these roles is a manifestation of the same underlying mechanism for combining concepts, for under- standing how they interact (Black, 1962) and for determining how they are connected (Fauconnier and Turner, 1998), even if those connections are tenuous, hidden or not always obvious (Collins and Loftus, 1975). For example, consider the connections needed to make and understand the above metaphors: Burqa ⇒ ≡ for concealing a Muslim woman ≈ for protecting a Muslim woman ≈ protecting a woman ≈ for protecting a person Armor ⇐ Make-up ⇒ ≡ typically worn by women ≈ expected to be worn by women ≈ must be worn by women ≈ must be worn by Muslim women Burqa ⇐ In each case we see how metaphor draws out and highlights, in a modified or exaggerated form, an existing aspect of each target concept. In other words, metaphor does not indiscriminately transplant arbitrary aspects of a source concept onto a target, but accommodates a selective graft of the most salient aspects of this source …

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