Why is Artificial Intelligence concerned with metaphor, and what special contributions can AI offer to metaphor research? This chapter will indicate why AI needs to study metaphor and will outline what AI has been contributing to the illumination of metaphor, whether it is processed by artefacts or by the human mind. Specific contributions AI research on metaphor that one can already point to, ...

Metaphor understanding in Computational Linguistics has largely been focused on the development of stand-alone prototypes for which only small-scale evaluations are carried out. This has made difficult the inclusion of metaphor in the development of natural language processing applications. However, dealing with metaphor properly is ultimately crucial for any automated language technology that ...

Metaphor is a cognitive phenomenon exhibited in language, where one conceptual domain (the target) is thought of in terms of another (the source). The first level of metaphor interpretation is the mapping of linguistic metaphors to pairs of source and target concepts. Based on the abductive approach to metaphor interpretation proposed by Hobbs (1992) and implemented in the open-source Metaphor-...

The AHRC-funded ‘Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus’ project has traced the development of metaphor in English from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day using the unique evidence base of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. The Historical Thesaurus organises the contents of the OED semantically, making it possible to see how vocabulary for any given concept has...

We present an approach to mining online forums for figurative language such as metaphor. We target in particular online discussions within the illness and the political conflict domains, with a view to constructing corpora of Metaphor in Illness Discussion, and Metaphor in Political Conflict Discussion. This paper reports on our ongoing efforts to combine manual and automatic detection strategi...