A Service-Oriented Architecture for Metaphor Processing

Metaphor is much more than a pyrotechnical flourish of language or a fascinating conceptual puzzle: it is a cognitive lever that allows speakers to leverage their knowledge of one domain to describe, reframe and understand another. Though NLP researchers tend to view metaphor as a problem to be solved, metaphor is perhaps more fittingly seen as a solution to be used, that is, as an important tool in the support of creative thinking and the generation of diverse linguistic outputs. Since it pays to think of metaphor as a foundational cognitive service, one that can be exploited in a wide array of creative computational tasks, we present here a view of metaphor as a public Web service that can be freely called on demand.