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<Paper uid="J84-1001">
  <Title>A Knowledge Representation Approach to Understanding Metaphors</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
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1. Introduction
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    <Paragraph position="0"> One can hardly fail to notice the flurry of intellectual activity that currently surrounds the understanding of the use of figurative language. The interest is multidisciplinary - linguistics, psychology, philosophy, education, to name a few of the more active disciplines.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The reason, which anyone writing on the subject hastens to point out, is that the observation of natural speech demonstrates clearly that it is rarely confined to the strictly literal. Figurative language is not merely an ornament of the poet but abounds in the every-day speech of everyday people and as such is a legitimate area of inquiry for researchers - in any discipline - who are concerned with understanding natural language. The interest in metaphor in computer understanding of natural languages stems from this same source. It is well understood that people, when conversing with machines, can no more be constrained to literal language than they can be expected to be long contented, within the confines of a synthetic language.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> 2. Scope of the Study The heading &amp;quot;figurative language&amp;quot; comprises the traditional figures of speech know as synechdoche, metonymy, hyperbole, personification, irony, etc., as well as the more common metaphor and simile. I am going to focus here on these latter two in order to narrow my view in the hope of achieving some depth and also because of a belief that the other figures may operate under similar principles. Except where noted, I will use the term &amp;quot;metaphor&amp;quot; in referring to both similes and metaphors. Please note that this does not imply that I am taking the position that metaphors and similes are the same; in fact, there is some evidence that they function differently from one another. At the least, it seems possible that the distinction between these two is more than the traditional one of implicitness versus explicitness since there are instances of metaphors that sound strange when &amp;quot;transformed&amp;quot; into similes and vice versa. I therefore am using the term &amp;quot;metaphor&amp;quot; in a very loose way to cover the area metaphors and similes have in common (for example, the similarity in the figurative reads of John is an animal and John is like an animal), without pausing at this time to delve into its exact nature and ignoring for the moment the apparent differences.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> To start, I will work only with isolated sentences of the form</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> In sentences of this form, A is commonly referred to as the &amp;quot;topic&amp;quot;, the B term as the &amp;quot;vehicle&amp;quot;. That which they have in common is called the &amp;quot;ground&amp;quot;. In a sentence like Copyright 1984 by the Association for Computational Linguistics. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made for direct commercial advantage and the CL reference and this copyright notice are included on the first page. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or specific permission. 0362-613X/84/010001 - 14503.00 Computational Linguistics, Volume 10, Number 1, January-March 1984 1 E. Judith Weiner A Knowledge Representation Approach to Understanding Metaphors (2) Billboards are like warts then, the topic is billboards, the vehicle warts and the ground ugliness and (perhaps) prominence.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> In restricting this study to sentences of the form (1), my motives here again are to constrain the unwieldiness of the subject. Of course this rules out a large body of possible metaphorical utterances of other forms. Many of these, however, if confined to one sentence, could be restated in the form of (1) with no significant loss of meaning. I will not discuss them here. I will, however, have something to say later about the larger linguistic context (discourse.) The typed word, the presumed form of input of natural language to a computer until such time as actual speech understanding systems develop sufficiently, imposes limitations of its own on the scope of any language processing system. The most obvious is, of course, that variation in intonation of the input is limited to its most &amp;quot;neutral&amp;quot; pattern; prosodic features must largely be ignored. (A certain amount of emphasis or contrastive stress may be obtained by underlining, but the study of this should be considered separately.) Another, perhaps more relevant consideration, is the use of a space to separate parts of what must be considered a single lexical item, e.g., blind alley. Historically, this was undoubtedly a metaphor (and a candidate for this study); today it is most probably interpreted as a single unit. Although most native speakers of English would classify it as an idiom through an awareness of the written form and the fact that even in the spoken version the component parts are clearly recognized, there should be no attempt to componentially process such forms.</Paragraph>
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