Application of the ATT-Meta Metaphor-Understanding System to an Example of the Metaphorical View of MIND PARTS AS PERSONS Technical Report CSRP-01-09

The main aim of this report is to provide a measure of objective evaluation of ATT-Meta, a system we have implemented for conducting some of the reasoning needed in the understanding of metaphorical utterances. The report thereby also provides some evaluation of the overall theoretical approach informing ATT-Meta. The approach and system are not described in detail here, but rather in an accompanying technical report (CSRP-01-05). However, the present report is self-contained. Its evaluation of the ATTMeta system consists of showing how the system extracts important target-domain information from a particular metaphor example that was found in real discourse. This example rests on the metaphorical view of MIND PARTS AS PERSONS, in which a person or a person’s mind is viewed as having parts that are themselves persons, or as otherwise containing persons, where these persons have their own mental states. The view is extensively used in mundane conversation and text. The report shows that the system successfully produces major pieces of information conveyed by the example utterance. It does so on the basis of a very limited set of mapping relationships included in ATT-Meta as its long-term knowledge of the metaphorical view. The implementation of the example also helps to vindicate the Map-Extension Minimization stance within the ATT-Meta approach. This stance is that metaphorical mappings should, by default, not be extended to cope with utterance aspects that those mappings do not deal with. Rather, within-source-domain reasoning should be used to link those aspects to source-domain aspects that the mappings do already deal with.