The Lexicon and Figurative Language
July 11 2003, Sapporo, Japan
Post-Conference Workshop as part of ACL 2003
endorsed by the ACL Special Interest Group
on the Lexicon (SIGLEX)
http://www.siglex.org
Workshop Description
The problem of word-sense disambiguation is currently one of the central concerns of natural
language processing. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that WordNet-type ap-
proaches that list the different polysemous senses of a word without saying anything about
how they relate to each other lead to considerable problems. Novel uses of words occur fre-
quently and the problem is particularly acute when figurative language is being used. Figurative
language, such as metaphor, metonymy, idioms and so on, is pervasive in normal discourse,
but the source meaning of a word being used metaphorically is often far removed from the in-
tended, target, meaning. Unless WordNet-type approaches are enriched with additional means
to relate source and target domains, figurative language will continue to be a major problem
for word-sense disambiguation.
An alternative is not to just list all the different senses but to have fewer senses and employ
a different mechanism for generating new senses and treating the relations between them. The
Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky 1995) assumes a structure to the lexicon and much richer
representations that determine how different senses combine in context. Whilst some success
has been achieved with some of the more simple cases of metonymy, the question of how well
the approach copes with metaphor is open to debate.
Another alternative would be to treat computationally the claim from Cognitive Linguistics
that metaphor is not a matter of linguistic expression. Instead, the meanings of many different
words are best related in terms of an underlying conceptual metaphor. However, if metaphor
is a cognitive rather than a linguistic phenomenon, and word senses are related solely in terms
of their underlying conceptual domains, then this implies that there need be no structure
specifically in the lexicon that relates senses. Instead the lexicon can be a list of items, but
metaphorical extensions of words would not be listed as a matter of course. The list approach
is compatible with WordNet-type approaches, but puts the approach in conflict with that of
the generative lexicon. Thus, we might pose the question as to how much structure is needed
in the lexicon in order to cope with figurative language. Of course, if we are looking outside the
lexicon to relate source and target domains, then this doesn’t solve the problem of word-sense
disambiguation, but passes the problem on to the designers of ontologies.
We therefore have three different approaches to the lexicon and the problems that figurative
language poses for word-sense disambiguation, and the major theme of this workshop is to
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explore means for tackling these problems, particularly means that could be used in practical
NLP applications.
However, papers that computationallyaddress otheraspects offigurative language, including
metaphor, metonymy, idioms, and so on, will also be welcomed. In particular, since word
meanings do not come marked with the information that they are metaphorical, metonymical,
or not, papers that address the issue of how to distinguish literal from non-literal language will
be very welcome, especially if this can be done automatically. Likewise, much work on figurative
language has relied on intuitions and handcrafted relations, and in this respect research on
figurative language has lagged behind recent work in the rest of computational linguistics.
Consequently, there is an urgent need for computational corpus studies of figurative language.
Workshop Organizers
John Barnden School of Computer Science J.A.Barnden@cs.bham.ac.uk
University of Birmingham
Birmingham B15 2TT, U.K.
Sheila Glasbey School of Computer Science S.R.Glasbey@cs.bham.ac.uk
University of Birmingham
Birmingham B15 2TT, U.K.
Mark Lee School of Computer Science M.G.Lee@cs.bham.ac.uk
University of Birmingham
Birmingham B15 2TT, U.K.
Alan Wallington School of Computer Science A.M.Wallington@cs.bham.ac.uk
University of Birmingham
Birmingham B15 2TT, U.K.
We wish to thank the following additional referees:
• Tony Berber Sardinha: LAEL, Catholic University of Sao Paulo, Brazil.
• Dan Fass: Gavagai Technology and School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser Univer-
sity, Canada.
• Josef van Genabith: Computer Applications Department, Dublin City University, Ireland.
• Adam Kilgarriff: Information technology Research Institute, University of Brighton, UK.
• Katja Markert: Language Technology Group, University of Edinburgh, UK.
• James Martin: Department of Computer Science and the Institute of Cognitive Science,
University of Colorado at Boulder, USA.
• Tony Veale: Department of Computer Science, University College Dublin, Ireland.
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