An experiment was carried out to test the thesis that people employ sensory-motor conceptual metaphors to understand metaphorical expressions. Congenitally blind and sighted participants paraphrased metaphorical expressions derived from the UNDERSTANDING is GRASPING and UNDERSTANDING is SEEING conceptual metaphors, and evaluated to what extent they felt they had understood them. On the one hand...

Metaphorical expressions are pervasive in natural language and pose a substantial challenge for computational semantics. The inherent compositionality of metaphor makes it an important test case for compositional distributional semantic models (CDSMs). This paper is the first to investigate whether metaphorical composition warrants a distinct treatment in the CDSM framework. We propose a method...

Metaphorical interpretation and affect detection using context profiles from open-ended text input are challenging in affective language processing field. In this paper, we explore recognition of a few typical affective metaphorical phenomena and contextbased affect sensing using the modeling of speakers’ improvisational mood and other participants’ emotional influence to the speaking character...

The way people think about the World-Wide Web (WWW) has implications for the way that they navigate it. In this paper, we discuss the nature of people’s metaphorical conception of the WWW, as gathered from interviews with beginning and experienced web users. Based on linguistic data, we argue that people naturally think of the web as a kind of physical space in which they move, although informa...

>Inferenccs based on metaphors appear to play a major role in human common sense reasoning. This paper identifies and analyzes general inference patterns based upon ur Jerlying metaphors, in particular the pervasive balance principle. Strategies for metapnor comprehension are explored, and analogical mapping structures are proposed as a means of representing metaphorical relationships between d...

We present the first developmental computational model of metaphor comprehension, which seeks to relate the emergence of a distinction between literal and non-literal similarity in young children to the development of semantic representations. The model gradually learns to distinguish literal from metaphorical semantic juxtapositions as it acquires more knowledge about the vehicle domain. In ac...

Whereas rational and formal reasoning should be devoid of contradictions, people must often handle conflicting perspectives in everyday contexts. The present article is based on empirical studies of conflicting prototypes of forest in Sweden and Canada. Conflicting prototypes of forest correspond to different values and actions in real environments. The empirical data demonstrate how metaphoric...

We report our developments on metaphor and affect sensing for several metaphorical language phenomena including affects as external entities metaphor, food metaphor, animal metaphor, size metaphor, and anger metaphor. The metaphor and affect sensing component has been embedded in a conversational intelligent agent interacting with human users under loose scenarios. Evaluation for the detection ...

We illustrate how the use of metaphorical views for reasoning with metaphor requires the mapping of information such as event shape, event rate and mental/emotional states from the source domain to the target domain. Such mappings are domain-independent and can be implemented by means of rules we call View Neutral Mapping Adjuncts (VNMAs). We give a list of the main VNMAs that appear to be requ...

Metaphorical and contextual affect detection from open-ended text-based dialogue is challenging but essential for the building of effective intelligent user interfaces. In this paper, we report updated developments of an affect detection model from text, including affect detection from one particular type of metaphorical affective expression and affect detection based on context. The overall af...