Computational Approaches to Figurative Language

Computational approaches to figurative language are concerned with those situations in which the appropriate conceptual representation of an utterance differs fundamentally from that which could be composed from the ordinary meanings of the utterance's constituent words. The bulk of computational work in this area has addressed idiom, metonymy, metaphor, and indirect speech acts. These phenomena are generally recognized as being major impediments to the construction of successful natural language processing systems. Most such systems have attempted to deal with such figurative language through the use of extended notions of language conventions, general purpose reasoning methods, and strong notions of contextual expectations.