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A Computational Model of Metaphor Interpretation

Paper · 1991 · Dan Fass

Summary

Metadata mismatch: the supplied text does not come from Fass's paper on metaphor interpretation. It is the closing part of a book review of an edited volume on computational Functional Grammar (FG). This summary covers only that text. The library entry should be checked against the original PDF.

The review fragment first describes the volume's final section. It holds one paper by van der Korst, which presents an FG-based machine translation (MT) system. The system treats the predication underlying an utterance as language-independent, so FG effectively provides an interlingua. Translation then reduces to parsing the source and generating the target. The reviewer notes that this simplifies matters, because languages draw on different sets of predicates. The system therefore needs paraphrase relations between predications.

The overall verdict is mixed. The book matters as an early outline of a computational FG and brings functional insights to practical NLP. However, it reads as a loose collection held together mainly by debt to Dik (1978). It is weakly cross-referenced, stylistically inconsistent and poorly connected to mainstream NLP. It also never asks what concrete advantages FG offers NLP.

Key points

  • The extracted text is a book review fragment, not Fass (1991). It contains nothing on metaphor interpretation.
  • Section 6 ("On Translation") contains a single paper by van der Korst describing an FG MT system.
  • In that system, language-neutral predications serve as a ready-made interlingua, and paraphrase relations handle mismatches in predicate inventories between languages.
  • The reviewer's criticisms are:
    • The papers lack a coherent research program beyond their debt to Dik (1978).
    • Cross-referencing is poor, and style is inconsistent (e.g., "PROLOG" vs. "Prolog", endnotes vs. footnotes).
    • Links to the rest of NLP are few, and some misfire.
  • The main open question the reviewer raises is what distinctive benefits functional theories like FG bring to NLP.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 870 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Idioms & multiword expressions · 217 works

Cite

Cite as Dan Fass. 1991. A Computational Model of Metaphor Interpretation. Computational Linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@article{fass1991computational,
  title = {{A Computational Model of Metaphor Interpretation}},
  author = {Dan Fass},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1991},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/J91-1007/}
}

References

9 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Barnden, John A. (1989). "Belief, metaphorically speaking." In Proceedings, 1st International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Morgan Kaufmann. find
  2. Barnden, John A. (1990). "Naive metaphysics: A metaphor-based approach to propositional attitude representation (unabridged version)." Memorandum MCCS-90-174, Computing Research Laboratory, New Mexico State University. find
  3. Carbonell, Jaime G. (1982). "Metaphor: An inescapable phenomenon in natural Dan Fass is a visiting fellow at the Centre for Systems Science, Simon Fraser University, Canada. find
  4. Before this, he worked for three years at the Computing Research Laboratory, New Mexico State University, U.S.A. His Ph.D. is from the University of Essex, England. His research interests include the computer understanding of metaphor and metonymy, lexical ambiguity, machine-readable dictionaries, i… find
  5. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990, xviii + 307 pp. Paperbound, ISBN 0-7923-0635-X, $39.95 find
  6. Reviewed by Carol Van Ess-Dykema U.S. Department of Defense and Carnegie Mellon University language comprehension." In Strategies for natural language processing, edited by Wendy G. Lehnert and Martin H. Ringle, 415-434. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. find
  7. Jacobs, Paul S. (1987). "Knowledge-intensive natural language generation." Artificial Intelligence, 33, 325-378. find
  8. Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark (1980). Metaphors We Live By. The University of Chicago Press. find
  9. Norvig, Peter (1989). "Marker passing as a weak method for text inferencing." Cognitive Science, 13, 569-620. find

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