An Implemented System for Metaphor-Based Reasoning, With Special Application to Reasoning about Agents

KEYWORDS: metaphor-understanding algorithms metaphor of mind reasoning about agents' mental states personiication metaphor uncertain reasoning ABSTRACT: An implemented reasoning called ATT-Meta is sketched. It performs a type of metaphor-based reasoning. Although it relies on built-in knowledge of speciic metaphors, where a metaphor is a conceptual view of ones topic as another, it is very exible in allowing novel manifestations of those metaphors in discourse. The exibility is partly the result of semantic agnosticism with regard to metaphor, in other words not insisting that metaphorical utterances should necessarily have clearly identiiable meanings. Also, the metaphori-cal reasoning is fully integrated into a general framework for uncertain reasoning, enabling the system to cope with major sources of uncertainty in metaphor-based reasoning. The research has been focused on metaphors for mental states (even though the algorithms are more generally applicable), and as a result has some important connections with the study of agent descriptions in natural language discourse, multi-agent scenarios, personiication of non-agents, and reasoning about agents' metaphorical thoughts. The system also naturally leads to an approach to chained metaphor.