Extracting Concrete Senses of Lexicon through Measurement of Conceptual Similarity in Ontologies

The measurement of conceptual similarity in a hierarchical structure has been proposed by studies such as Wu and Palmer (1994) which have been summarized and evaluated in Budanisky and Hirst (2006). The present study applies the measurement of conceptual similarity to conceptual metaphor research by comparing concreteness of ontological resource nodes to several prototypical concrete nodes selected by human subjects. Here, the purpose of comparing conceptual similarity between nodes is to select a concrete sense for a word which is used metaphorically. Through using WordNet-SUMO interface such as SinicaBow (Huang, Chang and Lee, 2004), concrete senses of a lexicon will be selected once its SUMO nodes have been compared in terms of conceptual similarity with the prototypical concrete nodes. This study has strong implications for the interaction of psycholinguistic and computational linguistic fields in conceptual metaphor research.