An Approach to a Semantic Analysis of Metaphor

--- AN APPROACH TO A SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF METAPHOR --- Fumio MIZOGUCHI*, Akihiko YAMAMOTO*, * Department of Industrial Administration Tokyo University of Science Noda, Chiba 278, Japan Abstract The present study deals with conflict resolution process in metaphorical interpretation for the noun phrase. In order to make the problem mbre explicit, we have reviewed the knowledge representation with conflict both from cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. Then, we propose a semantic model which is obtained from the notion of Linguistics as Chemistry. That is, the model called "Semistry" is introduced so as to interprete a metaphor semantic bonds between nouns. By using production system couped with contex free parser (ELINGOL), the working system called META-SIM is constructed to analyze the noun phrase metaphor. Finally, there are discussions on a role of metaphor in human cognitive processing. I. Introduction A conflict resolution in semantic analysis is regarded as an important problem in natural language processing. In case of a human cognitive system, this kind of problem was discussed in the realm of behavioral decision making theories, such as Festinger's (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance and Abelson's (1968) Psychological implication. And also, it was discussed in the field of cognitive psychology which dealt with the human information processing mechanism, especially long-term memory (LTM) representation. The work of Kintsch (1969) in his structure of semantic memory was useful for insight into the conflict resolution in lexical item stored in LTM. He particularly made his attention on the problems on how one semantically unacceptable a sentence. If one selects the problem from artificial intelligence field, McDermott's (1974) TOPLE in "Ring formalism" was suggestive to a design of inference mechanism which could interprete unacceptable knowledge in a simple world model. This formarism also guided us about a construction of lexical data in natural language processing. By following these current issures on knowledge representation, the present study focuses the problem of conflict resolution in semantic analysis of Metaphor both from viewpoints of cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. For this purposes, we propose a new semantic model which can deal with the metaphorical interpretation together with the inference mechanism. And then, we will demonstrate examples of metaphorical analysis which is based on the proposed semantic model. 2. Semantic representation with conflict knowled~ Metaphor plays an important role in our understanding of language and of the world we describe through language. Thus, there have been a number of researches on the nature of metaphor since the time of Aristotle. Recently, historical survey on metaphor was made by Ortony, Reynolds & Alter (1978) on their paper titled "Metaphor: Theoretical and Empirical Research". Their main concerns on metaphor are to develop a model of metaphoric comprehension both from Psychological reaction time study and "Schema" based theoretical framework. To quote their paper: "The structure of a shema is of a series of variables together with relationships among them. There are constraints on the values that the variables may take, but these constraints are rarely absolute, although some values are typical than …

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