Metabank: A Knowledge‐base of Metaphoric Language Conventions

The frequent and conventional use of nonliteral language has been a major stumbling block for natural language processing systems since the early machine translation efforts. Metaphor, metonymy, and indirect speech acts are among the most troublesome phenomena. Recent computational efforts addressing these problems have taken an approach that emphasizes the use of systematic knowledge about nonliteral language conventions. We are currently engaged in an effort to supply this knowledge in the case of conventional metaphor. We are constructing MetaBank: an empirically derived and theoretically motivated knowledge‐base of English metaphorical conventions. This article describes our three‐part approach to the construction of MetaBank: the collection of on‐line textual resources and databases of linguistic generalizations, the development of a methodology for analyzing these resources, and the construction of a knowledge‐base based on the preceding analyses.