When machine translation (MT) knowledge is automatically constructed from bilingual corpora, redundant rules are acquired due to translation variety. These rules increase ambiguity or cause incorrect MT results. To overcome this problem, we constrain the sentences used for knowledge extraction to "the appropriate bilingual sentences for the MT." In this paper, we propose a method using translat...

Sarcasm is generally characterized as a figure of speech that involves the substitution of a literal by a figurative meaning, which is usually the opposite of the original literal meaning. We re-frame the sarcasm detection task as a type of word sense disambiguation problem, where the sense of a word is either literal or sarcastic. We call this the Literal/Sarcastic Sense Disambiguation (LSSD) ...

The construction of a figurative interpretation for a string like Some surgeons are butchers (Gildea & Glucks-berg, 1983) has been traditionally viewed as subordinate to the construction of a literal interpretation. What Cacciari and Glucksberg (1994) refer to as the standard view of figurative processing—a view that largely stems from Searle (1979) and Grice (1975)—contends that a figurative i...

Literal movement grammars (LMGs) provide a general account of extraposition phenomena through an attribute mechanism allowing top-down displacement of syntactical information. LMGs provide a simple and efficient treatment of complex linguistic phenomena such as cross-serial dependencies in German and Dutch—separating the treatment of natural language into a parsing phase closely resembling trad...

We investigate the effectiveness of different linguistic cues for distinguishing literal and non-literal usages of potentially idiomatic expressions. We focus specifically on features that generalize across different target expressions. While idioms on the whole are frequent, instances of each particular expression can be relatively infrequent and it will often not be feasible to extract and an...

We present the first developmental computational model of metaphor comprehension, which seeks to relate the emergence of a distinction between literal and non-literal similarity in young children to the development of semantic representations. The model gradually learns to distinguish literal from metaphorical semantic juxtapositions as it acquires more knowledge about the vehicle domain. In ac...

Experimental studies on polysemy have come to contradictory conclusions on whether words with multiple senses are stored as separate or shared mental representations. The present study examined the semantic relatedness and semantic similarity of literal and non-literal (metonymic and metaphorical) senses of three word classes: nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Two methods were used: a psycholinguis...