| Abstract | Besides making our thoughts more vivid and fillingour communication with richer imagery, metaphor plays afundamental structuralrole in our cognition, helping us organise and project knowledge.For example, whenwe say “a well-oiled political machine”, we view the concept ofpoliticalsystem in terms of a mechanism and transfer inferences from thedomain ofmechanisms onto our reasoning about political processes. Highlyfrequent intext, metaphorical language represents a significant challenge fornaturallanguage processing (NLP) systems; and large-scale, robust andaccuratemetaphor processing tools are needed to improve the overallquality of semanticinterpretation in today’s language technology. In this talk I willintroducestatistical models of metaphor identification and interpretationand discusshow statistical techniques can be applied to identify patterns ofthe use ofmetaphor in linguistic data and to generalise its higher-levelmechanisms fromtext. |