Metaphors Break the Rules

However, it is a general feature of metaphors that they violate hard or soft semantic constraints. They can be analyzed by detecting that these constraints have been violated, and describing how. Some of the gap in understanding can be closed simply by having a crisp model of argument types for the predicates that are denoted in text – a violation of those types is evidence for a metaphor. Closing the remaining gap, for more ambiguous cases, will require discourse analysis and real world knowledge to eliminate interpretations that are conceivable, but very unlikely. This sort of semantic analysis of metaphor is both possible and practical, and can be done at relatively modest cost by exploiting the state of the art in knowledge bases, inference and scalable shallow text analysis.