Debate has raged for decades over what counts as metaphor. Do proverbs, such as better the devil you know than the one you don't, involve metaphor? When we refer to a generic-brand tissue as a Kleenex, is that a metaphor? In this paper, we observe that controversial examples such as these fall into the class of structures called " Generic is Specific " in Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Jo...

We explore the role that metaphor plays in developing expressive devices by examining the MetaMuse system. MetaMuse is a prop-based system that uses the metaphor of rainfall to make the process of granular synthesis understandable. We discuss MetaMuse within a two-axis transparency framework that can be used as a predictor of the expressivity of musical devices. Metaphor depends on a literature...

Metonymy, as often treated as a subtype of metaphor by cognitive linguistics, has a different working mechanism; metaphor is based on perceived similarity between things while metonymy on the relationship within things themselves. Cognition and the use of language involve the access and manipulation of mental spaces, which are constructed from human perceptual experience and are extended throug...

We present a novel approach to the problem of multilingual conceptual metaphor recognition. Our approach extends recent work in conceptual metaphor discovery by combining a complex methodology for facet-based concept induction with a distributional vector space model of linguistic and conceptual metaphor. In the evaluation of our system in English, Spanish, Russian, and Farsi, we experiment wit...

Metaphor comprehension involves an interaction between the meaning of the topic and the vehicle terms of the metaphor. Meaning is represented by vectors in a high-dimensional semantic space. Predication modifies the topic vector by merging it with selected features of the vehicle vector. The resulting metaphor vector can be evaluated by comparing it with known landmarks in the semantic space. T...

In this paper, we discuss the use of the clothesline as a metaphor for designing a musical interface called Airer Choir. This interactive installation is based on the function of an ordinary object that is not a traditional instrument, and hanging articles of clothing is literally the gesture to use the interface. Based on this metaphor, a musical interface with high transparency was designed. ...

In this paper we demonstrate that identifying the mappings between the source and target domains for a conceptual metaphor allows for both a greater understanding of the conceptual basis of metaphors, and more effective language translation. We first introduce and explain the Animal Metaphor to support our idea. We show that the Animal Metaphor exists in both English and Chinese, but that it ma...

This paper concerns metaphor resource creation. It provides an account of methods used, problems discovered, and insights gained at the Hamburg Metaphor Database project, intended to inform similar resource creation initiatives, as well as future metaphor processing algorithms. After introducing the project, the theoretical underpinnings that motivate the subdivision of represented information ...

In the CLear project we develop a cooperative learning system for supporting learning and training processes of co-located and distributed groups. One of the fundamental concepts of CLear is the virtual room metaphor. We discuss divergent interpretations of this metaphor each appropriate for certain aspects of the learning process. We are exploring the implications of using such a metaphor for ...

Metaphor is indispensable in poetry. It showcases the poet’s creativity, and contributes to the overall emotional pertinence of the poem while honing its specific rhetorical impact. Previous work on metaphor detection relies on either rulebased or statistical models, none of them applied to poetry. Our method focuses on metaphor detection in a poetry corpus. It combines rule-based and statistic...