Qualia Extraction and Creative Metaphor in WordNet

There is an evident correlation between semantic distance and creativity in the treatment of metaphor. When the tenor and vehicle concepts of a metaphor are semantic neighbors, the local structure of the taxonomy can be used to constrain any interpretations and thus significantly curtail the breadth of the search space. This reliance on taxonomy makes WordNet ideally suited to the treatment of local metaphors. However, the distance involved in creative metaphors means that the tenor and vehicle rarely belong to the same semantic category, and interpretation must involve more than a simple recognition of a common taxonomic parent. Because creative metaphor effectively involves reconceptualization, interpretation must instead exploit the internal relational structure of the tenor and vehicle. In this paper we describe how certain key elements of the qualia structure of a concept, pertaining to its agentive and telic properties, can be automatically extracted from the sense glosses in WordNet.