Metaphor interpretation using paraphrases extracted from the web.
Interpreting metaphor is a hard but important problem in natural language processing that has numerous applications. One way to address this task is by finding a paraphrase that can replace the metaphorically used word in a given context. This approach has been previously implemented only within supervised frameworks, relying on manually constructed lexical resources, such as WordNet. In contrast, we present a fully unsupervised metaphor interpretation method that extracts literal paraphrases for metaphorical expressions from the Web. It achieves a precision of [Formula: see text], which is high for an unsupervised paraphrasing approach. Moreover, the method significantly outperforms both the baseline and the selectional preference-based method of Shutova employed in an unsupervised setting.
Department of Information and Communication Engineering, the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.
Danushka
D
Bollegala
Ekaterina
E
Shutova
D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D032882:Comprehension; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D019365:Metaphor; D009323:Natural Language Processing