Although the left hemisphere is critical for language, clinical, behavioral, and neuroimaging research suggest that the right hemisphere also contributes to language comprehension. In particular, research has suggested that figurative language may be one type of language that preferentially engages right hemisphere regions. However, there is disagreement about whether these regions within the r...

Comparisons are common linguistic devices used to indicate the likeness of two things. Often, this likeness is not meant in the literal sense—for example, “I slept like a log” does not imply that logs actually sleep. In this paper we propose a computational study of figurative comparisons, or similes. Our starting point is a new large dataset of comparisons extracted from product reviews and an...

Suppose you ask a colleague how a class he just taught went, and he replies that "It was a great class the students were glued to their seats." There are two clearly distinct interpretations of this utterance, which might usefully be categorized as a literal and a figurative one. Which interpretation you believe is appropriate will determine your course of action; whether you congratulate your ...

One of the hallmarks of human intelligence is the ability to go beyond literal meanings of utterances to infer speakers’ intended meanings, a feat that remains elusive to the most advanced artificial systems. Figurative language such as metaphor, in particular, provides a striking case where complex meanings arise that cannot be derived from the literal semantics alone. For example, My lawyer i...

In this article, we examine the relationship between literal and figurative meanings in view of mental spaces and conceptual blending theory as developed by Fauconnier & Turner (2002). Beginning with a brief introduction to the theory, we proceed by analyzing examples of metaphor, fictive motion, and virtual change to reveal various processes of meaning construction at work in a range of exampl...

This paper presents a corpus of annotated motion events and their event structure. We consider motion events triggered by a set of motion evoking words and contemplate both literal and figurative interpretations of them. Figurative motion events are extracted into the same event structure but are marked as figurative in the corpus. To represent the event structure of motion, we use the FrameNet...

This study investigated whether verbs in figurative language activate different types of associations than do verbs in literal language. In a sentence-priming experiment, we compared sentences featuring verbs in idiomatic phrases with control sentences in which the same verbs were meant literally. Participants made lexical decisions about nouns that were associated with either the verb’s litera...

Figurative language is a fundamental characteristic of elaborate forms of linguistic communication. We currently have very poor models of how figurative language may be constructed in computational terms. The overall aim is to identify possible regularities, intuitions or heuristics that may at a later stage be employed to drive a text generator that is capable of using this type of

Semantic figurative metaphors modify visualization models and add non-data visual cues to visualizations. They result from an authorial intent to transmit stronger messages and emotionally connect with broad audiences. This article describes how I make use of semantic figurative metaphors across three applications, discussing design decisions and the limitations of this approach.