Some phrases can be interpreted either idiomatically (figuratively) or literally in context, and the precise identification of idioms is indispensable for full-fledged natural language processing (NLP). To this end, we have constructed an idiom corpus for Japanese. This paper reports on the corpus and the results of an idiom identification experiment using the corpus. The corpus targets 146 amb...

This paper introduces the work performed to manually label linguistic metaphors in the document collection of SemEval 2013, in the Spanish lexical disambiguation task. The objectives of this work are two: first, to make a prior identification of the difficulties inherent in metaphor detection in Spanish, and second, to generate a new linguistic resource as a collection of Spanish documents with...

This paper describes an effort to capture the sense alternation of dot-type nominals using Word Sense Induction (WSI). We propose dot-type nominals generate more semantically consistent groupings when clustered into more than two clusters, accounting for literal, metonymic and underspecified senses. Using a class-based approach, we replace individual lemmas with a placeholder representing the e...

Text reuse is a common way to transfer historical texts. It refers to the repetition of text in a new context and ranges from nearverbatim (literal) and para-phrasal reuse to completely non-literal reuse (e.g., allusions or translations). To improve the detection of reuse in historical texts, we need to better understand its characteristics. In this work, we investigate the relationship between...

This paper demonstrates that the polysemy of the verb grow is a result of natural extension of individual meanings connoted by its basic literal meaning and that the polysemy of grow, as such, can be disambiguated by applying simple rules of elimination to the argument structures, which are the contexts that make particular senses viable.

This paper presents a probabilistic model for sense disambiguation which chooses the best sense based on the conditional probability of sense paraphrases given a context. We use a topic model to decompose this conditional probability into two conditional probabilities with latent variables. We propose three different instantiations of the model for solving sense disambiguation problems with dif...

How do we understand time and other entities we can neither touch nor see? One possibility is that we tap into our concrete, experiential knowledge, including our understanding of physical space and motion, to make sense of abstract domains such as time. To examine how pervasive an aspect of cognition this is, we investigated whether thought about a nonliteral type of motion called fictive moti...

Do listeners process literal and figurative speech differently? Research testing interpretation times has resulted in mixed findings. Some researchers have found that figurative language is processed more slowly than literal language (e.g. Noveck et.al 2001) whereas others have not (e.g. Glucksberg 2003, Gibbs & Tendahl 2006). This may be due to limitations of standard reaction time methodology...

Separation methods used in organic chemistry are briefly reviewed, emphasis being placed on aspects that are frequently ignored, and special attention being paid to the analytical applications of separation. The relevance of physical, inorganic and analytical chemistry for organic chemistry is stressed. The term 'separation' can be used in analytical chemistry in both a literal and figurative s...

In this paper we present an active learning approach used to create an annotated corpus of literal and nonliteral usages of verbs. The model uses nearly unsupervised word-sense disambiguation and clustering techniques. We report on experiments in which a human expert is asked to correct system predictions in different stages of learning: (i) after the last iteration when the clustering step has...