A development method of a metaphorical search engine

The purpose of this research is to propose a development method of a metaphorical search engine that reflects the metaphor understanding process of human-beings. Our goal is to realize a search engine which outputs the image of an object inputted metaphorically using the expression of “A like B”. For example, when you input “A dog like clouds”, the metaphorical search engine would output a visual image like the photograph of a white and puffy dog as the image. In this research, at first, the probabilistic relationship between concepts and their attributes is computed using a statistical analysis of language data to develop a computational model of metaphor understanding process. Secondly, psychological experiments are executed to examine the validity of the probabilistic relationship. Finally, using those results, a development method of a metaphorical search engine is proposed.