Logical metonymies (The student finished the beer) represent a challenge to compositionality since they involve semantic content not overtly realized in the sentence (covert events → drinking the beer). We present a contrastive study of two classes of computational models for logical metonymy in German, namely a probabilistic and a distributional, similarity-based model. These are built using t...

This article comments on some ways in which metaphor is relevant to practical language technology, for either text or speech. While the article mentions some deep problems, it nevertheless points out that certain issues are less troublesome than they might appear to be, and that metaphor in real discourse has some characteristics that could help, rather than hinder, practical discourseprocessin...

Hierarchy building from dictionaries and free texts is often viewed as an application of NLP for domain modeling. The reversal (i.e. building and using such hierarchy for Word Sense Disambiguation) is also definitively useful in NLP. Indeed, we do observe that, even in very specialized texts, polysemous terms as well as blurring linguistic phenomena like metonymy or metaphor are frequent. Conce...

It is crucial for computers to detect metonymic expressions because sentences including them may have different meanings from literal ones. In previous studies, detecting metonymies has been done mainly by rule-based and statistical approaches. The problem of current metonymy detection is that using syntactic and semantic information may be not enough to detect metonymic expressions. In this st...

3. One may need to make the replaced entity available as a referent. Metonymies such as the infamous "ham sandwich" example allow anaphora to the replaced referent: "The ham sandwich wants a cup of coffee. He also needs a new fork". The metonymy may in fact result in a full-fledged use of the referent, entering the entity into the "given" register; examples such as "I drive a Volvo, but the eng...

Our ordinary, human conceptual systems struggle daily with complex ideas and language. Indeed, the most complex thoughts often demand speci!c cognitive inventions to make their comprehension easier, and one of the most common strategies for improving comprehension is metaphor. Metaphor, of course, has a speci!c interpretation in literary studies, but, in the !eld of linguistics, its meaning is ...