{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"Metaphor Interpretation as Selective Inferencing","authors":[{"name":"Jerry R. Hobbs","slug":"jerry-r-hobbs","given":"Jerry R.","family":"Hobbs","affiliation":""}],"abstract":"Metaphor pervades natural language discourse. T hi s paper describes a computational approach to t he interpretation of metaphors. It is based on a n a tural language processing system that uses the dis c ourse problems posed by a text to select the r e l e vant inferences. The problem of interpreting me taphors can then be translated into the problem of selecting the relevant inferences to draw from th e metaphorical expression. Thus, a metaphor is f r e quently given a cor=ect interpretation as a byproduct of the other things a natural language s ystem has to do. Two examples of metaphors are g iv e n -- a spatial metaphor schema from computer sc i e nce, and a novel metaphor --and it is shown ho w the interpretation problem for each can be translated into a selective inferencing problem and so lved by the ordinary operations of the system. This framework sheds light on the analogical processes that underlie metaphor and begins to explain ~he power of metaphor.","doi":null,"url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1981/19","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1981/0019.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1981/19.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1981/bibtex/19","volume":{"slug":"1981","title":"Proceedings of the Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 1981","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1981/","year":1981,"location":"Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada","dates":"24-28 August 1981","editors":"Roger C. Schank","isbn":"","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence","doi_prefix":""},"section":"Natural Language","track":"Natural Language","number":19,"pages":{"first":85,"last":90},"keywords":[],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}