When agents meet cross-cultural metaphor: can they be equipped to parse and generate it?

• Authors: Patricia O'Neill-Brown
• Venue: Computation for metaphors, analogy, and agents
• Year: 1999

There is a growing awareness in the natural language processing community that metaphor is ubiquitous in language and thought, that it is not "rare" or "special," and as such, ought best be accounted for within a general theory of meaning. The computing environment does not escape metaphor's ubiquitous hold: it is, at all levels, metaphorical. Systems are being designed by a diverse array of individuals who come to the programming task with differing views of metaphorical meaning attribution. Thrown into the mix are users, who also exhibit such diversity. This paper presents the findings of a study that demonstrates that second language (L2) learners have difficulty understanding and producing L2 metaphor and argues that as agents step into and attempt to operate in diverse environments, they will encounter stumbling blocks in effectively interacting with the environment, other agents and humans if not equipped with adaptive communicative features.