The IAMTC project (Interlingual Annotation of Multilingual Translation Corpora) is developing an interlingual representation framework for annotation of parallel corpora (English paired with Arabic, French, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish) with deep-semantic representations. In particular, we are investigating meaning equivalent paraphrases involving conversives and non-literal language us...

This study investigates the processing of idiomatic variants through an eye-tracking experiment. Four types of idiom variants were included, in addition to the canonical form and the literal meaning. Results suggest that modifications to idioms, modulo obvious effects of length differences, are not more difficult to process than the canonical forms themselves. This fits with recent corpus findi...

We develop a model of figurative or indirect speech, which may convey a meaning that differs from its literal meaning. The model yields analytical conditions for speech to be figurative in equilibrium and delivers a number of comparative statics results. For instance, it predicts that the likelihood of figurative speech is greater if the benefit to the listener of correctly understanding the sp...

Parallel corpora are often not as parallel as one might assume: non-literal translations and noisy translations abound, even in curated corpora routinely used for training and evaluation. We use a cross-lingual textual entailment system to distinguish sentence pairs that are parallel in meaning from those that are not, and show that filtering out divergent examples from training improves transl...

This paper presents a formal semantics of verbal irony in assertions. In particular, it makes precise what is meant by the common intuition that an ironic utterance expresses the opposite of its literal meaning. We start by considering cases of verbal irony that are marked by a particular prosodic tune in English. We then demonstrate that an extant model for intonational meaning can be extended...

Attractiveness principal in Iranian- Islamic architecture and decorating in this issue Iranian Architecture in the period of Islam use different means to show the influential and effective thoughts and interpretations and meanings on the people. One way to identify the means is to Research and investigate in the audience’s cognition and understanding particularly architectures and identify the ...

activation have presented prime words in contexts where the meaning of each word was invariant (e.g., word puzzles). In this research, we used words in contexts that supported either literal or figurative meanings, and found that only the con text-appropriate meanings had subsequent priming effects on person-perception judgments. In Experiment 1 , participants read the word "fire" in one of thr...

Stylistic variations of language, such as formality, carry speakers’ intention beyond literal meaning and should be conveyed adequately in translation. We propose to use lexical formality models to control the formality level of machine translation output. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in empirical evaluations, as measured by automatic metrics and human assessments.