Steven.Minton@CMU-CS-A.ARPA (04/11/84)
The following references might prove helpful if you're interested in
AI and metaphor comprehension:
Carbonell, J.G. and Minton, S. "Metaphor and Common-Sense Reasoning"
CMU tech report CMU-CS-83-110, March 83
Carbonell, J.G. "Metaphor: An Inescapable Phenomenon in Natural Language
Processing", in Strategies for Natural Language Processing, W. Lehnert
and M. Ringle (eds.), Erlbaum 1982
Carbonell, J.G. "Invariance Heirarchies in Metaphor Interpretation"
Proceedings of the 3rd Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 1981
There's a large body of literature on analogical reasoning and other
aspects of metaphor comprehension. Much of the relevant research
has been done within psychology and linguistics. I'd suggest looking at
these for an overview:
Ortony, A. (Ed.) "Metaphor and Thought" Cambridge Univ. Press 1979
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. "Metaphors We Live By" Chicago Univ. Press 1980
Gentner D. "Structure-Mapping: A Theoretical Framework for Analogy" in
Cognitive Science, Vol. 7, No.2 1983
Winston P. "Learning by Creating and Justifying Transfer Frames" in
Arificial Intelligence, Vol. 10, No. 2, 1978
I don't know of any natural language system which can handle a wide range
of novel metaphors, and I don't expect to see one soon.
Any such system would have to contain an enormous amount of
knowledge. Unlike most present-day NL systems, a robust metaphor comprehension
system would have to be able to understand many different domains.
In spite of this difficulty, metaphor comprehension remains a fertile
area for AI research. I've spent some time examining how people
understand sentences like: "The US/Russian arms negations are a high
stakes poker game". When you get right down to it, its amazing that
people can figure out exactly what the mapping between "arms negotiatations"
and "poker games" is. What's most amazing is that using and understanding
metaphors APPEARS to take so little effort. (In fact, they are often the
easiest way to to rapidly communicate complex technical information. The next
time you are at a talk, try counting the analogies and metaphors used.)
-- Steve Minton, CMU