Communications of the ACM
Hey Siri, an Ancient Algorithm May Help You Grasp Metaphors
New research from the University of California, Berkeley, and Pennsylvania's Lehigh University suggests Siri and other digital helpers could someday learn the algorithms that humans have used for centuries to create and understand metaphorical language.
Credit: Berkeley News
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have found digital assistants such as Siri could one day learn the algorithms that humans have used for centuries to create and understand metaphorical language.
The researchers mapped 1,100 years of metaphoric English language and detected patterns in how English speakers have added figurative word meanings to their vocabulary. The team says the findings provide the first large-scale evidence that the creation of new metaphorical word meanings is systematic, which may inform efforts to design natural-language processing systems to help them understand creativity in human language.
"This work brings opportunities toward modeling metaphorical words at a broad scale, ultimately allowing the construction of artificial intelligence systems that are capable of creating and comprehending metaphorical language," says Berkeley professor Mahesh Srinivasan.
During testing, the researchers found their models correctly predicted about 75% of recorded metaphorical language mappings over the past millennium.
From Berkeley News
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