Generating and Understanding Creative Comparisons

If creativity is a reaction against the norm, then to understand and exploit creativity one must first understand and adequately represent this norm. In other words, to produce the extraordinary, as a human or as a machine, one must first understand the ordinary. Creativity is a large theme that manifests itself in many small ways in language, and in this paper we address one such manifestation of linguistic creativity, the comparison statement. Since linguistic comparisons run the gamut from the ordinary (mundane and commonplace) to the extraordinary (i.e., novel, striking and/or humorous), they provide an excellent vehicle for understanding the interplay between norms and creativity.