CP 2015 - 8th AISB Symposium on Computing and Philosophy: The Significance of Metaphor and Other Figurative Modes of Expression and Thought

Communication and expression in language, pictures, diagrams, gesture, music etc. is rich with figurative aspects, such as metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole and irony. People engage in such communication and expression in a variety of contexts and with a range of effects. Modelling figurative patterns of communication/expression is a key aim of academic disciplines such as linguistics, philosophy, discourse studies, and psycholinguistics, and automatically understanding such phenomena is a long-standing and now expanding endeavour within Artificial Intelligence. A particularly interesting current area of research is work on automatically generating as well as understanding metaphor -- both understanding and generation are emerging as important sites for addressing long-standing problems in linguistics, artificial intelligence, philosophy, and cognitive science more generally. In addition, some researchers have suggested that metaphor can be an intrinsic part of thought, not just of external communication/expression.