A direct comparison of metonymic and metaphoric relations in adjective–noun pairs

Theories on metaphor and metonymy make different claims about the nature of the underlying processes in the computation of these two types of language use, i.e., whether they differ or not. Experimental investigations of metonymy and metaphor have generally not compared these two phenomena in a straightforward manner among others due to structural variability. To overcome this shortcoming, we conducted a study in German that used adjective–noun combinations to contrast metaphor and metonymy directly in an ERP-study during reading for comprehension. By combining three different nouns with one adjective in predicative position we construed adjective–noun pairs with literal (the baby was lively), metonymic (the eyes were lively) or metaphoric (the speed was lively) relations. The data revealed a more pronounced N400 for the metaphoric relations in comparison to the literal controls. We argue that the enhanced cost for metaphors reflects the activation process of two unrelated domains via mapping or extended predication. The metonymic adjective–noun pairs only showed a small trend to differ from the other two conditions. This might indicate that metonymies require mapping processes or shifts only within a single domain or domain matrix. Moreover, in contrast to previous studies, we did not find a Late Positivity. We explain this result with regard to different discourse representational consequences arising during combinatorial processing

Metaphoric coherence: Distinguishing verbal metaphor from `anomaly\u27

Theories and computational models of metaphor comprehension generally circumvent the question of metaphor versus “anomaly” in favor of a treatment of metaphor versus literal language. Making the distinction between metaphoric and “anomalous” expressions is subject to wide variation in judgment, yet humans agree that some potentially metaphoric expressions are much more comprehensible than others. In the context of a program which interprets simple isolated sentences that are potential instances of cross‐modal and other verbal metaphor, I consider some possible coherence criteria which must be satisfied for an expression to be “conceivable” metaphorically. Metaphoric constraints on object nominals are represented as abstracted or extended along with the invariant structural components of the verb meaning in a metaphor. This approach distinguishes what is preserved in metaphoric extension from that which is “violated”, thus referring to both “similarity” and “dissimilarity” views of metaphor. The role and potential limits of represented abstracted properties and constraints is discussed as they relate to the recognition of incoherent semantic combinations and the rejection or adjustment of metaphoric interpretations

Connectionist models and figurative speech

This paper contains an introduction to connectionist models. Then we focus on the question of how novel figurative usages of descriptive adjectives may be interpreted in a structured connectionist model of conceptual combination. The suggestion is that inferences drawn from an adjective\u27s use in familiar contexts form the basis for all possible interpretations of the adjective in a novel context. The more plausible of the possibilities, it is speculated, are reinforced by some form of one-shot learning, rendering the interpretative process obsolete after only one (memorable) encounter with a novel figure of speech

Visualizing the semantic content of large text databases using text maps

A methodology for generating text map representations of the semantic content of text databases is presented. Text maps provide a graphical metaphor for conceptualizing and visualizing the contents and data interrelationships of large text databases. Described are a set of experiments conducted against the TIPSTER corpora of Wall Street Journal articles. These experiments provide an introduction to current work in the representation and visualization of documents by way of their semantic content

Enhancements onMultiword Extraction and Inclusion of Relevant SingleWords on LocalMaxs

The digital information available to us reproduces itself in an overwhelmingly rapid way. Following advances in Text Mining, this large amount of information can now be processed and understood more swiftly by people. For this purpose, the concept of extracting Relevant Expressions and Keywords from a text becomes an important task. This process consists in retrieving the most important ideas from a document or set of documents, which can be done using statistical and/or linguistic tools, being the first the focus of this work. In order to extract these terminologies using statistical methodologies, one must take advantage of patterns that indicate importance in a word/expression. Relevant Expressions tend to present some singularities, as the words therein, seem to have, for example, high values of cohesion between them, conveying importance. The LocalMaxs is an algorithm that uses this cohesion metric between words to capture meaningful Multi Word Expressions from a text, with an average Precision close to 70%, but it is not able to extract 1-grams (single words). This dissertation aims at improving the performance of this algorithm, as well as including the newly added Relevant Single Words, which is an important factor specially in languages where relevant compound nouns come in long words (i.e. German). These improvements must be made keeping language independence.A informação disponível em forma digital aumenta a uma velocidade estonteante, tornando difícil o seu processamento e acompanhamento. Utilizando técnicas de Text Mining, esta grande quantidade de informação pode ser lida e compreendida de forma mais expedita por Humanos. A extração de Expressões e Termos Relevantes é um processo crucial para a decomposição de um documento ou grupo de documentos, e consiste na recolha dos conceitos mais importantes dos mesmos. Este processo é realizado através da utilização de ferramentas estatísticas (focadas neste trabalho) e/ou linguísticas. Para extrair estas terminologias utilizando métodos estatísticos, têm que ser encontrados padrões que indiquem e apontem para a importância e relevância de uma palavra/ expressão. Expressões Relevantes apresentam várias características que as definem, sendo uma das quais a verificação de altos valores de coesão estatística entre as palavras que as compõem. O algoritmo LocalMaxs utiliza estes valores de coesão entre palavras para extraír Expressões Relevantes de um texto, com uma precisão de aproximadamente 70%. Não consegue, no entanto, extrair 1-gramas (palavras isoladas) Relevantes. Esta dissertação tem como objetivo melhorar a performance na extração de Expressões Relevantes do algoritmo LocalMaxs, bem como criar mecanismos que o permitam extrair 1-gramas relevantes. Estes melhoramentos devem manter o algoritmo independente da língua do texto em análise

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

What does semantic tiling of the cortex tell us about semantics?

Recent use of voxel-wise modeling in cognitive neuroscience suggests that semantic maps tile the cortex. Although this impressive research establishes distributed cortical areas active during the conceptual processing that underlies semantics, it tells us little about the nature of this processing. While mapping concepts between Marr's computational and implementation levels to support neural encoding and decoding, this approach ignores Marr's algorithmic level, central for understanding the mechanisms that implement cognition, in general, and conceptual processing, in particular. Following decades of research in cognitive science and neuroscience, what do we know so far about the representation and processing mechanisms that implement conceptual abilities? Most basically, much is known about the mechanisms associated with: (1) features and frame representations, (2) grounded, abstract, and linguistic representations, (3) knowledge-based inference, (4) concept composition, and (5) conceptual flexibility. Rather than explaining these fundamental representation and processing mechanisms, semantic tiles simply provide a trace of their activity over a relatively short time period within a specific learning context. Establishing the mechanisms that implement conceptual processing in the brain will require more than mapping it to cortical (and sub-cortical) activity, with process models from cognitive science likely to play central roles in specifying the intervening mechanisms. More generally, neuroscience will not achieve its basic goals until it establishes algorithmic-level mechanisms that contribute essential explanations to how the brain works, going beyond simply establishing the brain areas that respond to various task conditions

Identification of sense selection in regular polysemy using shallow features

Proceedings of the 18th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics NODALIDA 2011. Editors: Bolette Sandford Pedersen, Gunta Nešpore and Inguna Skadiņa. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 11 (2011), 18-25. © 2011 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/16955