ViewGen, an algorithm and program for belief ascription, represents the beliefs of agents as explicit, partitioned proposition-sets known as environments. A way of extending View-Gen to the interpretation of metaphor, and in particular to the comprehension of metaphor within the belief spaces of particular agents, has been described elsewhere. The paper reports the further refinement and recent implementation of this approach, as well as summarizing the argument for the claim that ordinary non-metaphorical belief ascription and the transfer of information in metaphors can both be seen as different manifestations of a single environment-amalgamation process, one in which explicitly metaphorical amalgamations are triggered by "preference breaking " in the sentence being processed. This requires a consideration of the scoping of metaphor with respect to belief contexts, analogous to the scoping of quantification and definite descriptions with respect to such contexts. As a topic of ongoing and future work, the issue of mixed metaphor, of two distinct types, is briefly addressed. 1 ViewGen: The Basic Belief Engine A computational model of belief ascription is described in detail elsewhere [Wilks and Bien, 1979, 1983] [Ballim, 1987] [Wilks and Ballim, 1987] [Ballim and Wilks, in press] and is embodied in a prolog program called View-Gen. The basic algorithm of this model uses the notion of default reasoning to ascribe beliefs to other agents unless there is evidence to prevent the ascription. Perrault [1987, 1990] and Cohen and Levesque [1985] have also recently explored a belief and speech act logic based on a single explicit default axiom. As our previous work has shown for some years, the default ascription is basically correct, but the phenomena are more complex than are normally captured by an axiomatic approach. ViewGen also avoids certain counter-intuitive assumptions, such as the non-persistence of ignorance about any given proposition p [Perrault, 1990]. Also such systems

ABSTRACT: It has often been said that metaphors are based on analogies, but the nature of this relation has never been made precise. This article rigorously and formally specifies two semantic relations that do obtain between some metaphors and analogies. We argue that analogies often provide conditions of meaningfulness and truth for metaphors. An analogy is treated as an isomorphism from a source to topic domain. Metaphors are thought of as surface structures. Formal analogical conditions of meaningfulness and truth are fully and rigorously worked out for several grammatical classes of metaphors. By providing analogical meaningfulness and truth conditions for metaphors, this article shows that truth-conditional semantics can be extended to metaphors.

Although metaphor is generally recognized as an integral component of everyday language, very few computational systems capable of understanding metaphoric utterances exist today. This thesis describes one approach to the problem and presents PoEM, a prototype system which recognizes and interprets metaphoric descriptions of emotions and mental states in single-sentence input. Building upon previous work in knowledge-based metaphor comprehension, this research adopts a goal-driven approach which assumes each metaphor is selected by a speaker for its aptness at serving a particular communicative goal. To identify these goals, an empirical analysis of metaphor distribution in song lyrics was performed, and typical communicative intentions and surface patterns were identified for the top five most frequently occurring metaphor groups. These intentions and surface patterns have been implemented as a set of metaphor templates and interpretation rules in PoEM, using the WordNet lexical database for supplemental semantic information. Evaluation of PoEM demonstrates fairly

This docum.ew las been approved fm, public rolease and sale; its di3tri•.ution is unlimited.

Amherst, USA. He has been trained under a number of very bright and knowledgeable scholars from different fields. Besides his basic training as an electronics engineer and a computer scientist, he studied formal semantics and computational linguistics from Jan Landsbergen and Remko Scha at the Philips Research Labs in Eindhoven. During his Ph.D course, he studied brain theory and cybernetics with Michael Arbib and Nico Spinelli, formal semantics and linguistics with Barbara Partee, category theory and topos theory from Ernie Manes, and philosophy of language with Ed Gettier. All these experiences have resulted in a deeply interdisciplinary research work. After that he taught and carried out research in the USA, Asia and Europe. His main research interests are creative metaphors and analogies, and their formal and computational modeling. Indurkhya’s best known book, Metaphor and Cognition: An Interactionist Approach (1992), sets out an original and comprehensive theory of metaphor in which the interaction between the cognitive agent and his physical and cultural environment stands as a key explanatory principle for a set of issues related to cognition, such as categorization, inductive inference, change of theoretical paradigm, analogical reasoning, creativity etc. The various aspects described within this theoretical framework are discussed, deepened and declined with regard to specific issues in a long series of articles. Currently he has been facing the issue of perceptual similarity related to imagery, setting out an account of the mechanisms involved in visual metaphor

Metaphor and other forms of non-literal language are essential parts of language which have direct bearing on theories of lexical semantics. Neither narrow theories of lexical semantics, nor theories relying solely on world knowledge are sufficient to account for our ability to generate and interpret non-literal language. This paper presents an emerging approach that may provide such an account. This approach is based on systematic representations that capture non-literal language conventions, and mechanisms that can dynamically understand and learn new uses as they are encountered.

This paper surveys some of the important trends of the research on metaphor comprehension in the cognitive science area. We examine the semantic theories of the metaphor, some pros and (mostly) cons of the very challenged error-recovery model of metaphor comprehension. We present Lakoff's view that metaphors are conceptual rather than linguistic phenomena; we discuss how theories of other tropes are consistent with metaphor theories; and finally we talk about some attempts to develop a computational theory of the metaphor. 1 Motivation A legitimate question the reader of this paper might ask is: why metaphors? Aren't they the exclusive appanage of poets and writers? Is this a study about the psychology of people involved in comprehending literary works? The answer to these both questions is "not necessarily." Indeed, every day language is full of dead or novel metaphors. Metaphors are one of the most valuable sources of new words for a language; and the all English (or other languag...

The Career of Metaphor A central question in metaphor research is how metaphors establish mappings between concepts from different domains. We propose an account of metaphoric mappings based on structure-mapping theory. We then describe an evolutionary path in figurative language comprehension- the career of metaphor- in which there is a shift in mode of mapping from comparison to categorization as metaphors are conventionalized. Across three experiments, we show that conventional figurative statements differ from novel figurative statements in two important ways. At the representational level, conventional figurative statements differ in that they have stored metaphorical abstractions as alternate representations. At the processing level, whereas novel figurative statements are processed as comparisons, conventional figuratives can be processed either as comparison or as categorizations. The career of metaphor hypothesis offers a unified theoretical framework that can resolvee the current debate between comparison and categorization models of metaphor. Our account further suggests that whether metaphors are processed directly or indirectly, and whether they operate at the level of individual concepts or entire conceptual domains, will depend both on their degree of conventionality and on their grammatical form.

Abstract not found

The intricate phenomena of biology on one hand, and language and culture on the other, have inspired many writers to draw analogies between these two evolutionary systems. These analogies can be divided into four principal types: species/language, organism/concept, genes/culture, and cell/person. I argue that the last analogy--between cells and persons--is the most profound in several respects, and, more importantly, can be used to generate a number of empirical predictions. In the first half of the paper, the four analogies are each evaluated after briefly describing criteria for a good predictive analogy. In the second half of the paper, the cell/person analogy and predictions deriving from it are explored in detail.