Practical SGML By Eric Van Herwijnen

As-Living-Thing that includes 12 extended metaphors. However, no taxonomies are given for the other very general core metaphors used in MIDAS, which are LocationMetaphor, At-State, Have-State, Container-Metaphor, Kill-Metaphor, and EatingMetaphor. Moreover, there is little discussion of the relationship between these core metaphors. The third question is: is there some way to reduce the enormous number of metaphorical interpretations that MIDAS seeks? Step 3 of the metaphor interpretation algorithm given on page 95 states that MIDAS collects "all possible interpretations, both metaphorical and literal," including presumably direct application of the metaphors in MIDAS's knowledge base plus the use of MIDAS's metaphor extension techniques. Metaphors are sought where there are no constraint violations (p. 104). This is a vast amount of processing, and remember that MIDAS only uses 70 or so metaphors a larger system might contain hundreds. Martin might reply that realistic metaphor interpretation does involve an enormous amount of processing. He may be right.