Learning to Understand Figurative Language: From Similes to Metaphors to Irony

Simile is widely viewed as a less sophisticated conceptual device than metaphor, not least because similes are explicitly marked and are frequently more obvious about the meanings they carry. Nonetheless, this lack of sophistication makes simile an ideal basis for acquiring the category-specific knowledge required to understand metaphor. In this paper we describe a computational approach to simile and metaphor that takes the career-of-metaphor hypothesis of Bowdle and Gentner (2005) as its starting point. We describe how the category-defining knowledge required by metaphor can be acquired from exposure to explicit similes, and demonstrate that this knowledge offers a richer and more diagnostic picture of category structure than that acquired from alternate sources.