Metaphor Identification as Interpretation

Automatic metaphor identification and interpretation in text have been traditionally considered as two separate tasks in natural language processing (NLP) and addressed individually within computational frameworks. However, cognitive evidence suggests that humans are likely to perform these two tasks simultaneously, as part of a holistic metaphor comprehension process. We present a novel method that performs metaphor identification through its interpretation, being the first one in NLP to combine the two tasks in one step. It outperforms the previous approaches to metaphor identification both in terms of accuracy and coverage, as well as providing an interpretation for each identified expression.