Metaphoric Paraphrase Generation

This work describes the task of metaphoric paraphrase generation, in which we are given a literal sentence and are charged with generating a metaphoric paraphrase. We propose two different models for this task: a lexical replacement baseline and a novel sequence to sequence model, 'metaphor masking', that generates free metaphoric paraphrases. We use crowdsourcing to evaluate our results, as well as developing an automatic metric for evaluating metaphoric paraphrases. We show that while the lexical replacement baseline is capable of producing accurate paraphrases, they often lack metaphoricity, while our metaphor masking model excels in generating metaphoric sentences while performing nearly as well with regard to fluency and paraphrase quality.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure

Crowd-Sourcing A High-Quality Dataset for Metaphor Identification in Tweets

Metaphor is one of the most important elements of human communication, especially in informal settings such as social media. There have been a number of datasets created for metaphor identification, however, this task has proven difficult due to the nebulous nature of metaphoricity. In this paper, we present a crowd-sourcing approach for the creation of a dataset for metaphor identification, that is able to rapidly achieve large coverage over the different usages of metaphor in a given corpus while maintaining high accuracy. We validate this methodology by creating a set of 2,500 manually annotated tweets in English, for which we achieve inter-annotator agreement scores over 0.8, which is higher than other reported results that did not limit the task. This methodology is based on the use of an existing classifier for metaphor in order to assist in the identification and the selection of the examples for annotation, in a way that reduces the cognitive load for annotators and enables quick and accurate annotation. We selected a corpus of both general language tweets and political tweets relating to Brexit and we compare the resulting corpus on these two domains. As a result of this work, we have published the first dataset of tweets annotated for metaphors, which we believe will be invaluable for the development, training and evaluation of approaches for metaphor identification in tweets

Evaluation in natural language processing

quot; European Summer School on Language Logic and Information(ESSLLI 2007)(Trinity College Dublin Ireland 6-17 August 2007

Corpus annotation within the French FrameNet: a domain-by-domain methodology

International audienceThis paper reports on the development of a French FrameNet, within the ASFALDA project. While the first phase of the project focused on the development of a French set of frames and corresponding lexicon (Candito et al., 2014), this paper concentrates on the subsequent corpus annotation phase, which focused on four notional domains (commercial transactions, cognitive stances, causality and verbal communication). Given full coverage is not reachable for a relatively " new " FrameNet project, we advocate that focusing on specific notional domains allowed us to obtain full lexical coverage for the frames of these domains, while partially reflecting word sense ambiguities. Furthermore, as frames and roles were annotated on two French Treebanks (the French Treebank (Abeillé and Barrier, 2004) and the Sequoia Treebank (Candito and Seddah, 2012), we were able to extract a syntactico-semantic lexicon from the annotated frames. In the resource's current status, there are 98 frames, 662 frame-evoking words, 872 senses, and about 13000 annotated frames, with their semantic roles assigned to portions of text. The French FrameNet is freely available at alpage.inria.fr/asfalda

Directional adposition use in English, Swedish and Finnish

Directional adpositions such as to the left of describe where a Figure is in relation to a Ground. English and Swedish directional adpositions refer to the location of a Figure in relation to a Ground, whether both are static or in motion. In contrast, the Finnish directional adpositions edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) solely describe the location of a moving Figure in relation to a moving Ground (Nikanne, 2003). When using directional adpositions, a frame of reference must be assumed for interpreting the meaning of directional adpositions. For example, the meaning of to the left of in English can be based on a relative (speaker or listener based) reference frame or an intrinsic (object based) reference frame (Levinson, 1996). When a Figure and a Ground are both in motion, it is possible for a Figure to be described as being behind or in front of the Ground, even if neither have intrinsic features. As shown by Walker (in preparation), there are good reasons to assume that in the latter case a motion based reference frame is involved. This means that if Finnish speakers would use edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) more frequently in situations where both the Figure and Ground are in motion, a difference in reference frame use between Finnish on one hand and English and Swedish on the other could be expected. We asked native English, Swedish and Finnish speakers’ to select adpositions from a language specific list to describe the location of a Figure relative to a Ground when both were shown to be moving on a computer screen. We were interested in any differences between Finnish, English and Swedish speakers. All languages showed a predominant use of directional spatial adpositions referring to the lexical concepts TO THE LEFT OF, TO THE RIGHT OF, ABOVE and BELOW. There were no differences between the languages in directional adpositions use or reference frame use, including reference frame use based on motion. We conclude that despite differences in the grammars of the languages involved, and potential differences in reference frame system use, the three languages investigated encode Figure location in relation to Ground location in a similar way when both are in motion. Levinson, S. C. (1996). Frames of reference and Molyneux’s question: Crosslingiuistic evidence. In P. Bloom, M.A. Peterson, L. Nadel & M.F. Garrett (Eds.) Language and Space (pp.109-170). Massachusetts: MIT Press. Nikanne, U. (2003). How Finnish postpositions see the axis system. In E. van der Zee & J. Slack (Eds.), Representing direction in language and space. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Walker, C. (in preparation). Motion encoding in language, the use of spatial locatives in a motion context. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Lincoln, Lincoln. United Kingdo

TwitSong: A current events computer poet and the thorny problem of assessment.

This thesis is driven by the question of how computers can generate poetry, and how that poetry can be evaluated. We survey existing work on computer-generated poetry and interdisciplinary work on how to evaluate this type of computer-generated creative product. We perform experiments illuminating issues in evaluation which are specific to poetry. Finally, we produce and evaluate three versions of our own generative poetry system, TwitSong, which generates poetry based on the news, evaluates the desired qualities of the lines that it chooses, and, in its final form, can make targeted and goal-directed edits to its own work. While TwitSong does not turn out to produce poetry comparable to that of a human, it represents an advancement on the state of the art in its genre of computer-generated poetry, particularly in its ability to edit for qualities like topicality and emotion

Figuration & Frequency: A Usage-Based Approach to Metaphor

Two of the major claims of the cognitivist approach to metaphor, the paradigm which has emerged as dominant over the last three decades, are 1) that metaphor is a conceptual, rather than strictly linguistic, phenomenon, and 2) that metaphor exemplifies processes which are at work in cognition more generally. This view of metaphor is here placed within the context of the functionalist approach to language, which asserts that linguistic structure is emergent in nature, the use of language directly influencing the storage and representation thereof. The dissertation argues that metaphors, as conventionalized cognitive structures, are themselves highly influenced by frequency effects, and that metaphorical cross-domain mappings exist in the mind as conceptual schemata. Two corpus-based methods for assessing the frequency of overall metaphorical mappings are presented, both based on the use of key terms, attained using a survey method, for metaphorical source domains. These findings inform the hypotheses of a series of three experiments which test three key predictions of the view that metaphors are affected by frequency: that frequent metaphors should be more productive, accessible, and acceptable than infrequent ones. Both the corpus and experimental approaches, as well as data from previous research on metaphor at varying levels of conventionalization, support the view that metaphors are a usage-based phenomenon. The properties of various types of metaphorical utterances (e.g., idioms and novel metaphors) are best accounted for as arising from the interaction of the conceptual schemata that license cross-domain mappings, and syntactic schemata that link meanings to syntactic templates

The metaphorical brain [Research topic]

This Frontiers Special Issue will synthesize current findings on the cognitive neuroscience of metaphor, provide a forum for voicing novel perspectives, and promote new insights into the metaphorical brain