Sense-based Interpretation of Logical Metonymy Using a Statistical Method

The use of figurative language is ubiquitous in natural language texts and it is a serious bottleneck in automatic text understanding. We address the problem of interpretation of logical metonymy, using a statistical method. Our approach originates from that of Lapata and Lascarides (2003), which generates a list of nondisambiguated interpretations with their likelihood derived from a corpus. We propose a novel sense-based representation of the interpretation of logical metonymy and a more thorough evaluation method than that of Lapata and Lascarides (2003). By carrying out a human experiment we prove that such a representation is intuitive to human subjects. We derive a ranking scheme for verb senses using an unannotated corpus, WordNet sense numbering and glosses. We also provide an account of the requirements that different aspectual verbs impose onto the interpretation of logical metonymy. We tested our system on verb-object metonymic phrases. It identifies and ranks metonymic interpretations with the mean average precision of 0.83 as compared to the gold standard.