The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), from its very beginnings in the 1950s, has been criticized for its name, as well as its ambition. Most of the debate concerns the possibility of artificial intelligence, and presumes there is indeed some thing which is intelligence; the only question has been whether or not artificial systems can be built which exhibit, or have, this thing. That is, th...

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...

Early neuroimaging studies using Cyberball suggested that social rejection activated the pain matrix, as identified in studies of physical pain. However, these early studies were characterized by small sample sizes. Our statistical multi-level kernel density analysis (MKDA) of Cyberball neuroimaging studies with 244 participants fails to support the claim that social rejection operates on the s...

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...