Computer Interpretation of Metaphoric Phrases

1Metaphors: Human Use and Computer Processing

In the early days of computational linguistics (natural language processing/NLP or natural language understanding/NLU), interpretation of metaphoric text was not a great concern. It seemed that there were enough difficulties to occupy researchers in the interpretation of “ordinary” language. Nevertheless, in the mid-1970s there was some implemented computer research on partly metaphoric sentences, [20, 26], and figurative language including metaphor began to be a “hot topic” in some areas of psychology and other disciplines. Ortony’s edited multidisciplinary book, “Metaphor and Thought,” [14] appeared in 1979; Honeck and Hoffman’s edited book, “Cognition and Figurative Language” [9] and Lakoff and ...