The article concerns the dilemmas of an editor publishing, after almost 100 years, Stanisław Przybyszewski’s novel Homo sapiens, which was originally published in German. subject analysis are peculiar translations distorting sense message and grammatical, lexical syntactical errors. Examples literal idioms from German encourage reader to suggest new editorial solutions.

Sarcasm is a form of communication that is intended to mock or harass someone by using words with the opposite of their literal meaning. However, identification of sarcasm is somewhat difficult due to the gap between its literal and intended meaning. Recognition of sarcasm is a task that can potentially provide a lot of benefits to other areas of natural language processing. In this research, w...

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...

Idiomatic expressions formed from a verb and a noun in its direct object position are a productive cross-lingual class of multiword expressions, which can be used both idiomatically and as a literal combination. This paper presents the VNC-Tokens dataset, a resource of almost 3000 English verb–noun combination usages annotated as to whether they are literal or idiomatic. Previous research using...

An approach to sense extension tailored for polysemy associated with non-literal language expanded to include belief revision generally. The relationship between metaphor and genericity as rhetorical devices is discussed, and both are accounted for as related species within the same framework of dynamic semantics. The theoretical apparatus is related to a dominant theory of metaphor interpretat...

In this study, we used a novel cognitive paradigm and event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (ER-fMRI) to investigate the neural substrates involved in processing three different types of sentences. Participants read either metaphoric (Some surgeons are butchers), literal (Some surgeons are fathers), or non-meaningful sentences (Some surgeons are shelves) and had to decide whether ...

These are my notes for an April 24, 2006 lecture given at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute on the subject of period-index problems. This is true in a literal sense: there is another, significantly more detailed, writeup available which was pared down to yield the current version. (So if you are seriously interested in these matters, you will want to be reading the other version inst...