Encoding and acquiring meanings for figurative phrases

Abstract

Here we address the problem of mapping phrase meanings into their conceptual representations. Figurative phrases are pervasive in human communication, yet they are difficult to explain theoretically. In fact, the ability to handle idiosyncratic behavior of phrases should be a criterion for any theory of lexical representation. Due to the huge number of such phrases in the English language, phrase representation must be amenable to parsing, generation, and also to learning. In this paper we demonstrate a semantic representation which facilitates, for a wide variety of phrases, both learning and parsing.