Specifying Viewpoint and Information Need with Affective Metaphors: A System Demonstration of the Metaphor-Magnet Web App/Servic

Metaphors pervade our language because they are elastic enough to allow a speaker to express an affective viewpoint on a topic without committing to a specific meaning. This balance of expressiveness and indeterminism means that metaphors are just as useful for eliciting information as they are for conveying information. We explore here, via a demonstration of a system for metaphor interpretation and generation called Metaphor Magnet, the practical uses of metaphor as a basis for formulating affective information queries. We also consider the kinds of deep and shallow stereotypical knowledge that are needed for such a system, and demonstrate how they can be acquired from corpora and the web.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Tony Veale, Guofu Li
• Keywords: ACL 2012, Computational Linguistics, Expressiveness, Indeterminism, Metaphor Interpretation