The Cat and the Brocaded Bag: Using Metaphor Analysis to Computationally Process Creatively Modified Idioms

Theories and computational models of natural language understanding that handle idioms generally circumvent the question of novel modifications to idioms. Yet such variations are prevalent in the media. This paper addresses the perhaps most challenging type of idiom variation, i.e., variation of decomposable idioms through nontrivial metaphoric modifications in the source domain, i.e., the domain of the words of the idiom in their literal senses. An existing metaphor representation system is used as a basis for interpreting such idioms.