skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: Conversational Metaphors in Use: Exploring the Contrast between Technical and Everyday Notions of Metaphor
Much computational work has been done on identifying and interpreting the meaning of metaphors, but little work has been done on understanding the motivation behind the use of metaphor. To computationally model discourse and social positioning in metaphor, we need a corpus annotated with metaphors relevant to speaker intentions. This paper reports a corpus study as a first step towards computational work on social and discourse functions of metaphor. We use Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to annotate data from three web discussion forums covering distinct domains. We then compare these to annotations from our own annotation scheme which distinguish levels of metaphor with the labels: nonliteral, conventionalized, and literal. Our hope is that this work raises questions about what new work needs to be done in order to address the question of how metaphors are used to achieve social goals in interaction.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1302522
PAR ID:
10080461
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Second Workshop on Metaphor in NLP
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Rajala, A; Cortez, A; Hofmann, R; Jornet, A; Lotz-Sisitka, H; Markauskaite, L (Ed.)
    Energy is a central, cross-cutting concept in science, but its abstract nature poses challenges for learners. Metaphor has been recognized as a productive resource used by students, teachers, and scientists to understand and communicate about energy. While much research has focused on metaphors about energy expressed in learners’ speech, we know less about the range of ways learners use gesture to evoke metaphors about energy. In particular, the metaphor energy as substance has been found to be useful for conceptualizing various features of energy. Using a microethnographic approach, we demonstrate how students in an introductory algebra- based university physics course use gesture in three different ways to evoke substance-like metaphors that offer valuable affordances for sensemaking about energy: These include (1) container metaphor gestures, (2) stimulus metaphor gestures, and (3) accounting metaphor gestures. Implications for learning and teaching about energy are discussed. 
    more » « less
  2. Abstract The use of metaphor in cybersecurity discourse has become a topic of interest because of its ability to aid communication about abstract security concepts. In this paper, we borrow from existing metaphor identification algorithms and general theories to create a lightweight metaphor identification algorithm, which uses only one external source of knowledge. The algorithm also introduces a real time corpus builder for extracting collocates; this is, identifying words that appear together more frequently than chance. We implement several variations of the introduced algorithm and empirically evaluate the output using the TroFi dataset, a de facto evaluation dataset in metaphor research. We find first, contrary to our expectation, that adding word sense disambiguation to our metaphor identification algorithm decreases its performance. Second, we find, that our lightweight algorithms perform comparably to their existing, more complex, counterparts. Finally, we present the results of several case studies to observe the utility of the algorithm for future research in linguistic metaphor identification in text related to cybersecurity texts and threats. 
    more » « less
  3. Recent work suggests that though young children can comprehend metaphors based on shared percep-tual or functional features of objects, comprehending metaphors based on abstract relations across do-mains presents a greater challenge. We conducted two pre-registered studies (n = 272; mean age = 3.77 years; 143 female) to investigate children’s ability to understand metaphors based on object and abstract similarities. We also assessed how children’s language learning environments (monolingual or bilin-gual) relate to their metaphor comprehension. Children were successful in understanding both types of metaphors. In addition, monolingual and bilingual children were equally proficient in metaphor com-prehension. These findings highlight the sophisticated ways that preschool-aged children can use their rapidly developing lexicons. 
    more » « less
  4. Abstract Metaphor generation is both a creative act and a means of learning. When learning a new concept, people often create a metaphor to connect the new concept to existing knowledge. Does the manner in which people generate a metaphor, via sudden insight (Aha! moment) or deliberate analysis, influence the quality of generation and subsequent learning outcomes? According to some research, deliberate processing enhances knowledge retention; hence, generation via analysis likely leads to better concept learning. However, other research has shown that solutions generated via insight are better remembered. In the current study, participants were presented with science concepts and descriptions, then generated metaphors for the concepts. They also indicated how they generated each metaphor and rated their metaphor for novelty and aptness. We assessed participants’ learning outcomes with a memory test and evaluated the creative quality of the metaphors based on self‐ and crowd‐sourced ratings. Consistent with the deliberate processing benefit, participants became more familiar with the target science concept if they previously generated a metaphor for the concept via analysis compared to via insight. We also found that metaphors generated via analysis did not differ from metaphors generated via insight in quality (aptness or novelty) nor in how well they were remembered. However, participants’ self‐evaluations of metaphors generated via insight showed more agreement with independent raters, suggesting the role of insight in modulating the creative ideation process. These preliminary findings have implications for understanding the nature of insight during idea generation and its impact on learning. 
    more » « less
  5. Interest in communicative visualization has been growing in recent years. However, despite this growth, a solid theoretical foundation has not been established. In this paper I examine the role that conceptual metaphor theory may contribute to such a foundation. I present a brief background on conceptual metaphor theory, including a discussion on image schemas, conceptual metaphors, and embodied cognition. I speculate on the role of conceptual metaphor for explaining and (re)designing communicative visualizations by providing and discussing a small set of examples as anecdotal evidence of the possible value of conceptual metaphor. Finally, I discuss implications of conceptual metaphor theory for communicative visualization design and present some ideas for future research on this topic. 
    more » « less