Research Article
Metaphor Interpretation Using Paraphrases Extracted from the Web
Danushka Bollegala, Ekaterina Shutova
Published:
DOI:
10.1371/journal.pone.0074304
License:
© 2013 Bollegala, Shutova
2013
Bollegala, Shutova
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
Abstract
Interpreting metaphor is a hard but important problem in natural language processing that has numerous applications. One way to address this task is by finding a paraphrase that can replace the metaphorically used word in a given context. This approach has been previously implemented only within supervised frameworks, relying on manually constructed lexical resources, such as WordNet. In contrast, we present a fully unsupervised metaphor interpretation method that extracts literal paraphrases for metaphorical expressions from the Web. It achieves a precision of , which is high for an unsupervised paraphrasing approach. Moreover, the method significantly outperforms both the baseline and the selectional preference-based method of Shutova employed in an unsupervised setting.