"Sayeh-nama": A System for Understanding Metaphors Using the Shared Semantic Features of Term Pairs in the Metaphorical Contexts

Document Type : Original Article

Authors
1 M.A. student, Computational Linguistics, Languages and Linguistics Center, Sharif University of Technology
2 استادیار، گروه زبان‌شناسی رایانشی، مرکز زبان‌ها و زبان‌شناسی، دانشگاه صنعتی شریف
3 Assistant Professor, Computational Linguistics, Languages and Linguistics Center, Sharif University of Technology
Abstract
This paper introduces a system named “Sayeh-nama”. The overall idea is that such system is implemented for the first time in the field of metaphor for Persian. Sayeh-nama, with the purpose of helping the automatic understanding of metaphors, finds the shared semantic features of two terms in the metaphorical contexts. The overall process of this system consists of two phases. Firstly, the shared semantic features are extracted based on the second-order co-occurrence point-wise mutual information and then a number of adjectives are offered to describe these features. This method improves the performance of the system significantly in the systems of texts understanding, especially automatic understanding of the metaphors.

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