tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "METAPHORIC GENERALIZATION THROUGH SORT COERCION"

This paper presents a method for interpreting metaphoric language in the context of a portable natural language interface. The method licenses metaphoric uses via coercions between incompatible ontological sorts. The machinery allows both previously-known and unexpected metaphoric uses to be correctly interpreted and evaluated with respect to the backend expert system. | METAPHORIC GENERALIZATION THROUGH SORT COERCION Ellen Hays 10 Pine Avenue Arlington MA 02174 hays@ Abstract This paper presents a method for interpreting metaphoric language in the context of a portable natural language interface. The method licenses metaphoric uses via coercions between incompatible ontological sorts. The machinery allows both previously-known and unexpected metaphoric uses to be correctly interpreted and evaluated with respect to the backend expert system. 1 Introduction One of the central issues in Al systems has been how to model the domain what are the primitives of the ontological language how are the ontological sorts organized and so on. Al researchers have explored a wide range of object-centered and relation-centered representations for example Brachman and Schmolze 1985 and Minsky 1975 . When setting up the domain model for a natural language interface though one must also keep the lexicon in mind so that words can be defined and processed efficiently if possible the hierarchical organization of the domain model should minimize sense ambiguity by allowing lexical items to point to classes that dominate the objects that reflect each item s range of meanings. However a growing body of literature argues that the generalizations about the world implied by the lexicon do not correspond exactly to standard computational notions of fine-grained ontological structure. Rather the mapping is mediated by pervasive low-level metaphoric and metonymic processes as pointed out by Lakoff 1987 and others that make for a mismatch between the desired world model and the lexicon. Samuel Bayer The MITRE Corporation A040 Burlington Rd. Bedford MA 01730 sam@ At the MITRE Corporation we are developing an interface architecture to support King Kong our portable natural language interface for expert systems and AIMI our multimedia interface for the same class of Portable interfaces provide an additional set of problems beyond