A Nowledge Representation Approach to Understanding Metaphors

This study represents an exploration of the phenomenon of non-literal language ("metaphors") and an approach that lends itself to computational modeling. Ortony's theories of the way in which salience and asymmetry function in human metaphor processing are explored and expanded on the basis of numerous examples. A number of factors appear to be interacting in the metaphor comprehension process. In addition to salience and asymmetry, of major importance are incongruity, hyperbolicity, inexpressibility, prototypicality, and probable value range. Central to the model is a knowledge representation system incorporating these factors and allowing for the manner in which they interact. A version of KL-ONE (with small revisions) is used for this purpose.