Figurative language is a fundamental characteristic of elaborate forms of linguistic communication. We currently have very poor models of how figurative language may be constructed in computational terms. The overall aim is to identify possible regularities, intuitions or heuristics that may at a later stage be employed to drive a text generator that is capable of using this type of

One of the hallmarks of human intelligence is the ability to go beyond literal meanings of utterances to infer speakers’ intended meanings, a feat that remains elusive to the most advanced artificial systems. Figurative language such as metaphor, in particular, provides a striking case where complex meanings arise that cannot be derived from the literal semantics alone. For example, My lawyer i...

Although the field of natural language processing has made considerable strides in the automated processing of standard language, figurative (i.e., non-literal) language still causes great difficulty. Normally, when we understand human language we combine the meaning of individual words into larger units in a compositional manner. However, understanding figurative language often involves an int...

Suppose you ask a colleague how a class he just taught went, and he replies that "It was a great class the students were glued to their seats." There are two clearly distinct interpretations of this utterance, which might usefully be categorized as a literal and a figurative one. Which interpretation you believe is appropriate will determine your course of action; whether you congratulate your ...

Language is the main communication device to represent the environment and share a common understanding of the world that we perceive through our sensory organs. Therefore, each language might contain a great amount of sensorial elements to express the perceptions both in literal and figurative usage. To tackle the semantics of figurative language, several conceptual properties such as concrete...

Comparisons are common linguistic devices used to indicate the likeness of two things. Often, this likeness is not meant in the literal sense—for example, “I slept like a log” does not imply that logs actually sleep. In this paper we propose a computational study of figurative comparisons, or similes. Our starting point is a new large dataset of comparisons extracted from product reviews and an...

Metaphor and simile research has traditionally focused on the projection of content from vehicle to topic, thereby revealing new meaning in the topic. We show that the meaning of vehicles also changes during figurative language understanding. Participants read a poem that likens the temporal self to a snake being divided by a machete, and were asked to draw the snake. Against prototypical snake...

Cognitive linguists contend that learners’ awareness of motivations is the key in not only second language acquisition but also figurative language learning. Two cognitive-oriented methods are proposed to raise L2 learners’ awareness on metaphoric/metonymic expressions and to enhance retention: instruction involving conceptual metaphors (CM) and instruction involving metaphoric mappings (MM). T...

It's become a caricature of autistic persons that they don't understand figurative language. Despite empirical evidence to the contrary, three of the four contributions to this special issue endorse this stereotype without question. And all four contributions attribute this supposed deficit to even shakier fallacies, such as the controversial claim that autistic people lack empathy or a 'theory...