Understanding metonymies in discourse

Katja Markert, Udo Hahn
2002 Artificial Intelligence  
We propose a new computational model for the resolution of metonymies, a particular type of figurative language. Typically, metonymies are considered as a violation of semantic constraints (e.g., those expressed by selectional restrictions) that require some repair mechanism (e.g., type coercion) for proper interpretation. We reject this view, arguing that it misses out on the interpretation of a considerable number of utterances. Instead, we treat literal and figurative language on a par, by
more » ... mputing both kinds of interpretation independently from each other as long as their semantic representation structures are consistent with the underlying knowledge representation structures of the domain of discourse. The following general heuristic principles apply for making reasonable selections from the emerging readings. We argue that the embedding of utterances in a coherent discourse context is as important for recognizing and interpreting metonymic utterances as intrasentential semantic constraints. Therefore, in our approach, (metonymic or literal) interpretations that establish referential cohesion are preferred over ones that do not. In addition, metonymic interpretations that conform to a metonymy schema are preferred over metonymic ones that do not, and metonymic interpretations that are in conformance with knowledge-based aptness conditions are preferred over metonymic ones that are not. We lend further credit to our model by discussing empirical data from an evaluation study which highlights the importance of the discourse embedding of metonymy interpretation for both anaphora and metonymy resolution.  : S 0 0 0 4 -3 7 0 2 ( 0 1 ) 0 0 1 5 0 -3 1 We will not discuss problems associated with the lack of precision of this definition; cf. [26]. 2 Some researchers refer to these predicate-argument restrictions as selectional restrictions, e.g., Fass [18], others call them sortal constraints (Harabagiu [29]). We shall use the term 'selectional restriction' to characterize any semantic constraint on argument positions of a predicate related to its lexical or conceptual specification (e.g., in terms of the proper agent or patient of a verb). 3 Of course we are not the first researchers to have noticed that figurative language is not always indicated by SRVs. But whereas some theoretical linguists, e.g., Ortony [43] , have also made this point, the computational approaches to metonymy still focus on SRVs. A more detailed discussion of these claims is presented in Section 2.1.
doi:10.1016/s0004-3702(01)00150-3 fatcat:jpifngxsmrf6lhswyfrmqcx6wy