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Producing Figurative Expression: Theoretical, experimental and practical perspectives
Edited by John Barnden and Andrew Gargett
[Figurative Thought and Language 10] 2020
► pp. 419–448

Metaphor generation through context sensitive distributional semantics

| ction.ai
| Cognitive Science Research Group, School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London , Ljubljana | Department of Knowledge Technologies, InstitutJožef Stefan , Ljubljana
| Cognitive Science Research Group, School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London , Ljubljana | Vrije Universiteit Brussel

In this paper, we outline a preliminary methodology for generating metaphor based on contextual projections of representations built up through a statistical analysis of a large-scale linguistic corpus. These projections involve defining subspaces of co-occurrence statistics in which we show that metaphors can be modelled as mappings between congruent regions of semantic representations. We offer this methodology as an empirical implementation pointing towards a resolution of theoretical stances, at times incompatible, construing metaphor as on the one hand an artefact of underlying cognitive processes and on the other hand a product of the environmentally situated generation of ephemeral conceptual schemes.

Keywords: metaphor generation, pragmatics, distributional semantics, natural language processing, context sensitive semantic modelling
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2. Language in minds, minds in the world
  • 3.Computational approaches to metaphor
  • 4. Semantics in perspective
  • 5.Projecting metaphorical mappings
  • 6.Finding coherent subspaces
  • 7.The way forward
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 December 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ftl.10.15mcg
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