Syntactic Features and Word Similarity for Supervised Metonymy Resolution

We present a supervised machine learning algorithm for metonymy resolution, which exploits the similarity between examples of conventional metonymy. We show that syntactic head-modifier relations are a high precision feature for metonymy recognition but suffer from data sparseness

From semantic underdetermination via metaphor and metonymy to conceptual interaction

The question of semantic underdetermination is related to the distinction between what is said and what is implicated. In this paper we examine the relevance-theoretic notion of enrichment as a procedure for developing what is said into a fully specified proposition or explicature. We make the claim that there are two forms of such a procedure, viz. grammatically-motivated and conceptually-motivated enrichment, and discuss their role in communication. We further contend that the notion of enrichment and the other procedures of propositional development recognized in the relevance-theoretic literature are insufficient to account for all cases of explicated meaning. In this connection, we propose other cognitive mechanisms such as mitigation and more interestingly-metaphoric and metonymic mappings. This discussion allows us to cast some light on the implicature/explicature division line and to rank as explicatures some cases of inferences which have so far been considered as implicatures, including those where metaphor and metonymy are involved. Finally we examine the role of metaphoric and metonymic mappings - both in isolation and as part of conceptual interaction systems - in the production of explicatures, which allows us to understand better the communicative potential of these cognitive mechanisms

Classement de métonymies et son utilité dans la traduction automatique

The paper focuses on the problem of the classification of metonymy. Presenting various classifications of metonymy, the author wonders how they are useful for the purpose of automatic translation. The discussion undertaken in the paper concerns the classification proposed by Taouffic Massoussi, who in his doctoral dissertation has presented a very extensive and detailed classification of metonymy carried out from the point of view of automatic translation. On the basis of the analysis of selected examples, the author proposes a different classification of metonymic expressions employing the object-oriented approach proposed by Wiesław Banyś

Towards a textual theory of metonymy: a semiotic approach to the nature and role of metonymy in text

This thesis argues that the scope of metonymy throughout history remains severely reduced to a process of word substitution and the signifying potential of the trope is limited to lexical representation. The study therefore proposes a semiotic approach to take the trope beyond this limitation and to develop a textual theory to the trope. A background study related to how metonymy is treated in previous studies is therefore necessary. This review of literature covers a long period starting from ancient Greece and going up to the present day. Chapters one and two of this thesis, which give this general background, show that the hypothesis is to a large extent valid. The thesis then examines another related hypothesis which is that metonymy is semiotic in nature and a semiotic approach to metonymy will solve the problem of reductionism in the treatment of this trope. Chapter three is devoted to an examination of this hypothesis. It shows that a semiotic approach to metonymy is not only possible but also crucial. The semiotic approach to metonymy basically concerns the treatment of metonymy as a sign which cuts across three domains of representation. These are the domain of words, the domain of concepts and the domain of things or objects. The last domain is itself treated from a semiotic perspective to stand for the domain of context at large. on the basis of this semiotic approach to metonymy a textual model of metonymic relations in text is constructed. this model is put to the test in chapter four. here the metonymic relations of form for form, form for concept, form for thing, thing for form and concept for form are brought to bear on the formal and semantic connectedness of text. in chapter five the metonymic relations of concept for concept, concept for thing, thing for thing and thing for concept are used to explain how these metonymic relations interact to provide a linkage between language, cognition and context

Wikipedia-Based Semantic Enhancements for Information Nugget Retrieval

When the objective of an information retrieval task is to return a nugget rather than a document, query terms that exist in a document often will not be used in the most relevant nugget in the document for the query. In this thesis a new method of query expansion is proposed based on the Wikipedia link structure surrounding the most relevant articles selected either automatically or by human assessors for the query. Evaluated with the Nuggeteer automatic scoring software, which we show to have a high correlation with human assessor scores for the ciQA 2006 topics, an increase in the F-scores is found from the TREC Complex Interactive Question Answering task when integrating this expansion into an already high-performing baseline system. In addition, the method for finding synonyms using Wikipedia is evaluated using more common synonym detection tasks