Systematicity and the Lexicon in Creative Metaphor
Tony Veale
Department of Computer Science,
University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 6, Ireland.
Tony.veale@UCD.ie
Abstract
Aptness is an umbrella term that covers a 
multitude of issues in the interpretation and 
generation of creative metaphor. In this paper 
we concentrate on one of these issues —  the 
notion of lexical systematicity  —   and explore 
its role in ascertaining the coherence of creative 
metaphor relative to the structure of the target 
concept being described. We argue that all else 
being equal, the most apt metaphors are those 
that resonate most with the way the target 
concept is literally and metaphorically 
organized. As such, the lexicon plays a key role 
in enforcing and recognizing aptness, insofar as 
this existing organization will already have 
been lexicalized. We perform our exploration in 
the context of WordNet, and describe how 
relational structures can be automatically 
extracted from this lexical taxonomy to 
facilitate the interpretation of creative 
metaphors.
1   Introduction
When one considers the aptness of creative 
metaphor and how one might measure it, one finds 
a whole range of issues lurking between the 
apparent unity of this umbrella term. This 
complexity is compounded by the fact that 
metaphors operate at several different levels of 
representation simultaneously: the conceptual 
level, or the level of ideas; the lexical level, or the 
level of words; and the pragmatic level, or the 
level of intentions. A metaphor may fall at any of 
these hurdles, either through a poor choice of a 
source concept, a poor choice of words in 
communicating this concept, or in a failure to 
observe the expectations of the context in which 
the metaphor is expressed.
Some degree of aptness is afforded by 
metaphors that compare semantic neighbors, 
inasmuch as the existence of a common taxonomic 
parent suggests that the source and target are in the 
same, or at least similar, domains (e.g., see Way, 
1991). For instance, metaphors that compare 
politicians to architects, or even geneticists to 
cartographers, derive some measure of aptness 
from the fact that in each case the source and target 
are sub-categories of the Profession category. 
However, since the most creative of metaphors are 
those that make the greatest semantic leaps 
between the source and target concepts, such 
category-hopping metaphors do not have the 
luxury of comparing concepts that are already 
deemed similar in taxonomic terms, as evidenced 
by a common superordinate concept, but must 
instead establish a new basis for conveying 
similarity that is not itself taxonomic. Consider for 
instance a corollary of the above metaphor in 
which “ genomes are maps” . The aptness of these 
similarity-creating metaphors is instead a measure 
of the isomorphism between the relational 
structures of the source and target, so that the 
concepts with the greatest structural overlap will 
often produce the most apt metaphors. In this 
respect, metaphoric aptness is a function of what 
Gentner terms the systematicity of a structure-
mapping. According to (Gentner, 1983) and the 
structure-mapping school of thought (e.g., see also 
Veale and Keane, 1997), the best interpretations of 
a metaphor or analogy are those that systematically 
pair-off the greatest amount of connected relational 
structure in each concept. We refer to this kind of 
structural aptness as internal systematicity, since 
any sense of aptness arises out of a coherence 
between the internal structures of the concepts 
being mapped. 
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) also place a strong 
emphasis on metaphoric systematicity, but in their 
hands the notion is construed in more external
terms. To L&J, systematicity is a measure of the 
generativity of a metaphoric schema, so that the 
same schema (such as Life is a Journey) can serve 
as the deep structure for a wide variety of different, 
but mutually systematic, surface metaphors (such 
as “ my job has hit a rocky patch”  and “ my career 
has stalled” ). In this view, systematicity is a 
measure of how much a metaphor resonates and 
coheres with existing metaphors for thinking about 
the target concept, so that when viewed 
collectively, they together suggest the operation of 
a common underlying schema. This view of 
systematicity is external to the concepts involved 
since it predicates their aptness to each other on 
the existence of other structures (metaphor 
schemas) into which they can be coherently 
connected.
In this paper we argue that the lexicon is central 
to the determination of both kinds of systematicity, 
internal and external, especially if one is an 
adherent of the generative lexicon view of word 
meaning as championed by (Pustejovsky, 1991). In 
such a lexicon we can expect to find precisely the 
kind of relational structure needed to perform 
structure mapping and thereby measure the internal 
systematicity of a metaphor like “ a passport is a 
travel diary” . In addition, we can expect to find the 
lexicalized metaphor structures that represent the 
surface manifestations of existing modes of 
thought, and it is against these structures that the 
external systematicity of an interpretation can be 
measured. 
This research is conducted in the context of 
WordNet (Miller, 1995; Fellbaum, 1998), a 
comprehensive lexical knowledge-base of English. 
The structure of WordNet makes explicit some of 
the relationships needed to construct a generative 
lexicon, most obviously the formal (taxonomic) 
and constitutive (meronymic) aspects of word 
meaning. But to truly test a model of metaphoric 
interpretation on a large-scale, it is necessary to 
augment these relationships with the telic and 
agentive components that are not encoded directly 
but merely alluded to in the textual glosses 
associated with each sense entry. In the sections to 
follow we describe a mechanism for automating 
the extraction of these relationships (in the same 
vein as (Harabagiu et al. 1999), and for using them 
to generative apt interpretations for metaphors 
involving WordNet entries.
2   Qualia Extraction from Glosses
In a generative lexicon, the core elements of word 
meaning are represented by a nexus of relations 
called a qualia structure, which ties together the 
formal (i.e., hierarchical relations), constitutive 
(i.e., meronymic), telic (i.e., functional) and 
agentive (i.e., construction/creation) aspects of a 
word. For instance, a diary is formally a kind of 
?book’ that constitutes a ?collection of personal 
writings’ whose telic purpose is to ?record’ the 
observations of the agent that ?compiles’ it. When 
a word like “ diary”  is used metaphorically, this 
relational nexus provides the structure for 
determining the internal systematicity of any 
interpretation. For instance, it is apt to describe a 
passport as a kind of travel diary since both are 
kinds of book (formal) that record (telic) travel 
experiences.
We describe here an approach to qualia 
extraction from WordNet glosses that balances 
coverage with quality: by attempting to extract a 
relatively narrow slice of the relational structure 
inherent in WordNet glosses, we can be confident of 
quite high levels of competence. Nevertheless, even 
this narrow slice yields a significant amount of 
qualia structure, since WordNet already encodes 
formal and constitutive relations in its taxonomic 
and meronymic links between synsets. We thus 
concentrate our efforts on the extraction of telic 
(i.e., goal-oriented) and agentive (activity-oriented) 
lexical relations. 
We exploit the fact that the agentive and telic 
aspects of lexico-conceptual structure are often 
expressed using nominalized verbs that implicitly 
encode relational structure. A small number of 
highly productive morphology rules1 can thus be 
used to connect “observe” to “observer” and 
“observation” (and vice versa), “specialize”, to 
“specializer” and “specialization”, and so on. For 
example, the WordNet concepts  {botanist} and 
{philologist} are both defined with glosses that 
explicitly employ the term “specializing”, thus 
evoking the concept {specializer} (a hyponym of 
{expert}) Now, because {specializer} is compatible 
with the concepts {botanist} and {philologist} by 
virtue of being a hyponym of {person}, this in turn 
suggests that {botanist} and {philologist}  should 
be seen as hyponyms of {specializer}, making 
specializer_of is an appropriate telic relation for 
each. Thus, using a combination of derivational 
morphology and simple taxonomic reasoning, the 
relational structure specializer_of:specialization
can be associated with each concept. Since this 
structure is not already encoded in WordNet, it 
provides an additional dimension of similarity in 
any metaphoric mapping.  
Broad clues as to the syntactic form of the gloss 
(such as the use of the passive voice) are also a 
valuable source of extraction information, 
especially when they can be robustly inferred from 
a simple combination of keyword analysis and 
inflectional morphology. For example, the passive 
voice should cause an extracted relation to be 
inverted, as in the case of {dupe}, whose WordNet 
gloss is “a person who is swindled or tricked”. 
The resulting relational structure is thus:
                                                       
1 The developers of WordNet have recently announced that 
hand-coded morpho-semantic links will be added to future 
versions of WordNet, to make explicit the relationship 
between verbs and their nominal forms, thus obviating the 
need for such rules while making the extraction task even 
more reliable.
  {dupe}   of_swindler:swindler   of_trickster:trickster
Note that the extraction process is too shallow 
to do very much with the disjunctive “ or”  present 
in the gloss of {dupe}, as this is more a process of 
information extraction than full natural-language 
parsing. Thus, it simply conjoins any relationship 
that can be reliably extracted with morphological 
cues into an overall relational structure. This 
structure is simply a bag of relations at present, 
which we choose to present here as connected via 
conjunction. Future versions of the extraction 
process may attempt to impose a more elaborate 
inter-connecting structure on the relationships that 
are extracted, but for the present, an unstructured 
bag is sufficient to support a consideration of 
metaphor in WordNet. 
Since morphology alone is not a sufficiently 
reliable guide for extraction purposes, the approach 
crucially requires the WordNet taxonomy to act as 
a vital sanity-check for any extracted relationship. 
In general, it is sensible to associate a relation r 
with a concept c if the nominalization of r denotes a 
concept that belongs to the same taxonomic 
category as c; thus, it is sensible to ascribe a 
specializer_of relation to {botanist} only because 
{specializer} and {botanist} each specify a sub-
category of {person}.  However, this broad 
injunction finds an important exception in 
metonymic contexts. Consider the WordNet gloss 
for {diary, journal},  “a daily record of (usually 
private) experiences and observations”, which 
yields the extracted relationships of_diarist:diarist, 
of_experience: experience, recorder_of:recording
and observer_of:observation. A taxonomic sanity-
check reveals that {diary, journal}, as a sub-
category of {communication}, is not compatible 
with either {recorder} or {observer}, both sub-
categories of {person}. However, it is 
taxonomically compatible with the objects of these 
relations, {recording} and {observation}, which 
suggests that a diary is both the object of, and a 
metonym for, the diarist as observer and recorder. 
This metonymy is most evident in the familiar 
address “dear diary”, in which the diary is 
conceived as a personified counterpart of the 
observer. The concept {diary, journal} therefore 
yields the modified relational structure:
{diary, journal}  *observer_of:observation
 *recorder_of:recording
 of_experience:experience
The (*) here signals that the observer_of and 
recorder_of relations hold metonymically rather 
than literally. The presence of these relationships 
facilitate creative uses of the concept {diary} that 
follow the general pattern whereby artifacts are 
viewed from an intentional stance. For example, 
consider that the WordNet gloss for the concept 
{witness, spectator} is “a close observer”, so that 
the following relational structure is extracted:  
    {witness, spectator}     observer_of:observation
It now becomes apt to metaphorically consider a 
diary to be a witness to one’s life experiences. In 
structure-mapping terms, this aptness is reflected in 
the internal systematicity of finding a key 
relationship,  observer_of:observation, common to 
each of the concepts {diary} and {witness, 
spectator}.
3   Internal Systematicity
Because purely taxonomic interpretations are 
created on the basis of commonalities, they tend to 
be highly symmetric, as in the case of similes such 
as “ credit unions are like banks”  and “ gamblers are 
like alcoholics” . In contrast, the most creative 
metaphors are asymmetric (Ortony, 1991), since 
they impose the highly-developed relational 
structure of the source concept onto that of  the 
less-developed target (see Lakoff and Johnson, 
1980; Gentner, 1983; Veale and Keane, 1997). 
Without this imposition of relational structure, 
metaphor can be used only to highlight existing 
similarities rather than to actually create new ones, 
and is thus robbed of its creative function. 
The projection of relational structure can be 
performed either literally or figuratively. In a literal 
interpretation, the relational structure of the source 
is simply instantiated with the target concept, so for 
example, a literal “travel diary” is a diary that 
contains travel recordings and travel observations. 
In contrast, figurative interpretations first attempt 
to find a target domain correspondence for the 
source concept, and then project the relational 
structure of the source onto this counterpart 
(Gentner, 1983). For instance, WordNet contains a 
variety of concepts that are formally similar to 
{diary, journal} and which also mention “travel” in 
their glosses, such as {travel_guidebook} and 
{passport}.
“travel”+  {diary, journal}       
 {passport}  +  *observer_of:travel:observation
      *recorder_of:travel:recording
  of_experience:travel:experience
Projecting the relational structure of {diary, 
journal} onto {passport} causes the latter to be 
seen as a journal of travel observations and 
experiences, and indeed, many travelers retain old 
passports for this very purpose. 
Metaphors are most apt when projection 
highlights a latent relational structure that already 
exists in the target concept (Ortony, 1979). For 
example, the compound “pastry surgeon” can be 
understood taxonomically as referring to 
{pastry_cook},  since like {surgeon} it is a sub-
category of {person}. But to fully appreciate why 
{surgeon} is more apt than other hyponyms of 
{person}, like {astrologer} say, one must look to 
the shared relational structure that is highlighted by 
the metaphor. WordNet 1.6 defines a surgeon as a 
“physician who specializes in surgery”, while a 
pastry cook is glossed as “a chef who specializes in 
pastry”. Both {surgeon} and {pastry_cook} thus 
become associated with the relationship 
specializer_of:specialism. This common relational 
structure facilitates the measurement of what we 
have termed ‘internal systematicity’ (in the Gentner 
sense). Thus, {surgeon} is seen as an apt vehicle for 
{pastry_cook} as both are people that specialize in 
a particular field. Instantiation of the shared 
structure leads to the following interpretation:
“pastry” + {surgeon} 
{pastry_cook} + specializer_of: pastry:surgery
One can reasonably argue that much more 
sophisticated interpretations are available to 
human readers of this metaphor, e.g., that pastry 
cooking and surgery are both delicate operations 
involving special training, both are performed with 
specialized instruments in very clean surroundings, 
etc. But given the inherent limitations of working 
with an existing semi-structured knowledge source 
such as WordNet, as opposed to a dedicated, hand-
crafted knowledge-base, “ pastry specialist”  must 
suffice as a generalization for these richer 
interpretations. Alternately, one might argue that it 
is “ pastry”  rather than “ surgeon”  that undergoes 
metaphoric reinterpretation, so that the phrase 
denotes a literal surgeon that operates on 
metaphoric pastries, such as movie starlets or 
supermodels. In this current work we choose to 
focus on the relational potential for the head word 
to metaphorically denote a relationally similar, if 
sometimes semantically distant, referent, while 
acknowledging that this illuminates just one part 
of the picture.
Nonetheless, interpretations like “ pastry 
specialist”  can be given more credibility if one 
delves deeper into its metaphoric ramifications to 
consider the recursive sub-metaphors that it 
implies. For instance, as stated in the analysis 
above,  “ pastry surgeon”  implies the plausibility of 
a meaningful interpretation for “ pastry surgery” . 
This choice to delve deeper, and recursively 
determine an appropriate interpretation of “ pastry 
surgery” , is left to the comprehender, who may 
instead choose to read the metaphor as a simple 
request to view pastry chefs as specialists. But this 
raises the question of how much structure must be 
shared for an interpretation to appear apt rather 
than merely inept. For example, one can equally 
well say “ pastry linguist”  or “ pastry geologist”  to 
highlight the specialist nature of pastry chefs, since 
{geologist} and {linguist} are also associated with 
an extracted specializer_of relationship. What 
makes these alternate metaphors seem clumsy is 
the difficulty in assigning appropriate 
interpretations to the recursive metaphors that they 
imply: “ pastry geologist”  implies the metaphor 
“ pastry geology” , while “ pastry linguist”  implies 
the metaphor “ pastry linguistics” .
(?)  “pastry” + {linguist} 
{pastry_cook} + 
specializer_of:pastry:linguistics
There is little that can be done to put a sensible 
interpretation on “pastry linguistics” in WordNet, 
given the taxonomic and relational structure of 
{pastry} and {linguistics}. In contrast, “pastry 
surgery” has more potential for meaningful 
interpretation using WordNet structures. There 
exists a sense of surgery that denotes a discipline in 
the natural sciences, and from {pastry} a broad 
search will find the concept {dietetics}, another 
discipline of the natural sciences dedicated to food 
preparation. This analogue of {surgery} can be 
found by first considering all concepts associated 
with “pastry”, then all concepts associated with 
“baked goods”, then “foodstuff” and “food”, until 
an appropriately similar candidate is found.
   {dietetics}       the scientific study of food
 preparation and intake
This is not a particularly well-known concept, so it 
would be difficult to argue that this forms the 
cornerstone of an easily understood metaphor like 
“pastry surgeon”. However, the concept {dietetics}
does at least concretize, in WordNet terms, the idea 
that one can take a precise, scientific view of food 
preparation, and it is the plausibility of this notion 
that allows us to make sense of pastry preparation 
as a surgical activity. There is no true substitute for 
situated experience of the world, but when it comes 
to metaphor interpretation using lexical resources 
like WordNet, we should be willing to use any 
lexical precedent we can find.
As an alternate strategy, we can seek to recruit a 
sub-category of surgery that can be modified in 
some way to accommodate the concept {pastry}. 
One such category is {plastic_surgery}, whose 
gloss reveals a concern with the reformation of 
body tissue.
{plastic_surgery}   surgery concerned with 
therapeutic or cosmetic 
reformation of tissue
   “pastry” + {surgery} 
{plastic_surgery}  + reformation_of: pastry:tissue
This interpretation requires that an existing form of 
surgery is recruited and adapted so as to 
accommodate the concept {pastry}. In taxonomic 
terms, {plastic_surgery} is perhaps most 
appropriately adapted for this purpose, since 
{tissue} and {pastry} are both hyponyms of 
{substance} in WordNet. Of course, the intended 
sense of “ tissue”  in the above gloss is not {tissue, 
tissue_paper} but {tissue} as a hyponym of 
{body_part}. However, creative metaphors often 
involve a degree of domain incongruence, whereby 
a given word has a different meaning in the source 
and target domains (Ortony, 1979). In fact, one 
might say that domain incongruence is essential to 
creative metaphor, since interpretation will 
necessitate the grafting of structure from radically 
distant parts of the concept ontology, and such 
grafts may fail if the features involved maintain 
their strict, source-dependent definitions.
4   External Systematicity
Metaphors appear more apt when they 
systematically evoke, or connect into, established 
modes of metaphoric thought. This is systematicity 
considered from an external vantage as described 
by (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). For example, 
when processing the metaphor “ political 
mechanic” , several concepts can be reached from 
“ political”  that prove to be taxonomically 
compatible with {mechanic}, among them 
{political_leader}, {political_scientist} and 
{machine_politician}. However, closer inspection 
of the projected structure suggests that the last, 
{machine_politician}, is the most systematic:
“political” + {mechanic} 
     {machine_politician} 
   + machinist_of: political:machine
Because the extracted qualia structure for 
{mechanic} hinges on the relationship 
machinist_of:machine, there is a suggestive lexical 
systematicity with the concept 
{machine_politician}. Furthermore, the 
instantiated structure creates a fortuitous pairing 
political:machine, which already exists in 
WordNet as the lexicalized metaphor 
{political_machine}. This marks “ political 
mechanic”  as a systematic outgrowth of the 
established metaphor schema Political System As 
Machine (whose corollary is Political Operatives 
as Fixers). The same schema comes into play 
when interpreting the metaphor “ political 
draftsman” , whose WordNet gloss also evokes 
images of machinery.
Lexicalized metaphors like {political_machine}, 
{political_science} and {political_campaign} act 
as the recognizable landmarks in the search space 
of possible interpretations for novel metaphors. So 
if an interpretation can be generated that connects 
into an established metaphor, it has a greater 
provenance than one that stands alone. Here are 
some further examples:
{torchbearer}   a leader in a campaign or movement
  “political” + {torchbearer} 
       {political_leader} + campaigner_of:political:campaign
{missionary}   someone who attempts to convert 
  others to a [...]  program
    “political” + {missionary} 
   {political_commissar} + programmer_of: political:program
{sociologist}    a social scientist who studies 
[...] human society
    “political” + {sociologist} 
{political_scientist} + scientist_of: political:science
These examples are fortuitous in the sense that the 
instantiation of qualia structure directly suggests an 
existing WordNet concept. In most cases, however, 
the external systematicity becomes visible only 
upon recursive consideration of the instantiated 
structure as a source of metaphor in itself. Consider 
the metaphor “genetic cartographer”, for which 
{geneticist} is retrieved as a thematically similar 
concept:
{cartographer}     a person who makes maps
{geneticist}       a person who specializes in genetics
    “genetic” + {cartographer} 
{geneticist} + mapper_of: genetic:mapping
There is no denotation for “ genetic mapping”  in 
WordNet, so at first blush the above interpretation 
fails to connect into an existing lexicalized 
metaphor. However, when we recursively consider 
the combination “ genetic mapping”  as a metaphor 
in itself, we obtain the following interpretation:
    “genetic” + {mapping}   {chromosome_mapping}
 the process of locating genes 
  on a chromosome
This allows us to recognize “genetic mapping” as 
an alternate way of denoting the concept 
{chromosome_mapping}, while the fact that a 
mapping metaphor has already been lexicalized in 
the genetics domain allows us to recognize the 
external systematicity inherent in the interpretation 
of “geneticist as cartographer”. This WordNet entry 
serves to ground the sub-metaphor of genetic 
mapping in an existing concept, allowing the 
recursive analysis of sub-metaphors to halt at this 
point. A “genetic cartographer” is thus a geneticist 
that performs a specialized kind of map-making 
called chromosome mapping, where the terrain that 
is mapped is biological and information-theoretic 
rather than geological or geographic. Though 
chromosome mapping is itself a metaphor, its 
independent existence in WordNet means that it 
does not need to be justified in the context of an 
interpretation of “genetic cartographer”, and for the 
purposes of analysis can be treated as a literal 
stopping-point.
5   The Challenge of Aptness 
I suspect we can all agree that aptness involves a 
complex interaction of different issues that arise 
from lexical and conceptual choice. The real 
question is the degree to which each of these issues 
influences a particular interpretation, and the 
weighting, if any, that is to be given to each 
component of aptness in an algorithmic model. 
Take the metaphor “political surgeon”: by 
considering the concepts in the semantic 
neighborhood of {surgeon} reachable via the 
thematic cue “political”, we find the following 
competing interpretations:
{political_scientist}   a social scientist specializing in the 
study of government
{spin_doctor}        a spokesperson for a political party
or candidate who tries to 
forestall negative publicity
The first of these interpretations, 
{political_scientist}, is apt for reasons of internal 
systematicity, as both it and {surgeon} have an 
extracted qualia structure that contains a 
specializer_of:specialization relationship. This 
leads to the following interpretation:
“political” + {surgeon}  
       {political_scientist}
+ specializer_of:political:specialization
The second interpretation, {spin_doctor}, does not 
exhibit the same internal systematicity, but it does 
exhibit an external systematicity of sorts: the head 
of this compound term, “ doctor” , denotes a 
concept {doctor, physician} that is a hypernym of 
the metaphoric vehicle, {surgeon}. 
It would seem a matter of personal choice as to 
which interpretation should be privileged here, as 
different listeners may attach more weight to the 
presence of internal systematicity in 
{political_scientist} than to the suggestion of 
external systematicity in {spin_doctor}, and vice 
versa. This suggests that the problem of aptness 
determination involves a great deal of hidden 
parameters yet to be made explicit in any model of 
interpretation. As researchers interested in 
computational treatments of metaphor, our goal 
then should be to explicate what factors we can in 
algorithmic and representational terms, to provide 
the basic inventory of components needed to 
proceed with our investigation into this elusive and 
considerably vexing phenomenon. In this paper we 
have argued that the natural place to compile this 
inventory is the lexicon, since this acts as the 
bridge between word and world knowledge and 
aptness is a phenomenon that hops freely between 
both.

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