Metaphor and simile research has traditionally focused on the projection of content from vehicle to topic, thereby revealing new meaning in the topic. We show that the meaning of vehicles also changes during figurative language understanding. Participants read a poem that likens the temporal self to a snake being divided by a machete, and were asked to draw the snake. Against prototypical snake...

This paper describes the system used by the ValenTo team in the Task 11, Sentiment Analysis of Figurative Language in Twitter, at SemEval 2015. Our system used a regression model and additional external resources to assign polarity values. A distinctive feature of our approach is that we used not only wordsentiment lexicons providing polarity annotations, but also novel resources for dealing wi...

Cognitive linguists contend that learners’ awareness of motivations is the key in not only second language acquisition but also figurative language learning. Two cognitive-oriented methods are proposed to raise L2 learners’ awareness on metaphoric/metonymic expressions and to enhance retention: instruction involving conceptual metaphors (CM) and instruction involving metaphoric mappings (MM). T...

Similes are easily obtained from web-driven and casebased reasoning approaches. Still, generating thoughtful figurative descriptions with meaningful relation to narrative context and author style has not yet been fully explored. In this paper, the author prepares the foundation for a computational model which can achieve this level of aesthetic complexity. This paper also introduces and evaluat...

In the past we have witnessed our machine learning method for sentiment analysis coping well with figurative language, but determining with uncertainty the polarity of mildly figurative cases. We have shown that for these uncertain cases, a rule-based system should be consulted. We evaluate this collaborative approach on the ”Rotten Tomatoes” movie reviews dataset and compare it with other stat...

Figurative language poses a serious challenge to NLP systems. The use of idiomatic and metaphoric expressions is not only extremely widespread in natural language; many figurative expressions, in particular idioms, also behave idiosyncratically. These idiosyncrasies are not restricted to a non-compositional meaning but often also extend to syntactic properties, selectional preferences etc. To d...

It's become a caricature of autistic persons that they don't understand figurative language. Despite empirical evidence to the contrary, three of the four contributions to this special issue endorse this stereotype without question. And all four contributions attribute this supposed deficit to even shakier fallacies, such as the controversial claim that autistic people lack empathy or a 'theory...

Automatic detection of figurative language is a challenging task in computational linguistics. Recognising both literal and figurative meaning is not trivial for a machine and in some cases it is hard even for humans. For this reason novel and accurate systems able to recognise figurative languages are necessary. We present in this paper a novel computational model capable to detect sarcasm in ...

This chapter describes a technique for generating semi-abstract figurative imagery using variations on the Mandelbrot Set, evolved using a genetic algorithm. The Mandelbrot Set offers an infinite supply of complex fractal imagery, but its expressive ability is limited, as far as being a “material” for visual manipulation by artists. The technique described here achieves a unique and varied bran...