17 February 2010

Senses versus metaphors


  1. John drove his car to work.
  2. We dove to the university every morning.
  3. She drove me to school every day.
  4. He drives me crazy.
  5. She is driven by her passion.
  6. He drove the enemy back.
  7. She finally drove him to change jobs.
  8. He drove a nail into the wall.
  9. Bill drove the ball far out into the field.
  10. My students are driving away at ACL papers.
  11. What are you driving at?
  12. My new truck drives well.
  13. He drives a taxi in New York.
  14. The car drove around the corner.
  15. The farmer drove the cows into the barn.
  16. We drive the turnpike to work.
  17. Sally drove a golf ball clear across the green.
  18. Mary drove the baseball with the bat.
  19. We drove a tunnel through the hill.
  20. The steam drives the engine in the train.
  21. We drove the forest looking for game.
  22. Joe drove the game from their hiding holes.

  5. a directed course of conversation (WN 11)
  6. excavate horizontally, as in mining (WN 19)
  7. cause to function or operate (WN 20)








Carlos said...

Steven Pinker has a related discussion in his "Stuff of Thought". He shows a nice trick to differentiate the types of meanings hidden behind the verbs. Each "similar" meaning admits the same types of sentence construction, while different meanings clash in the way possible sentence constructions "are allowed". These cut across verb boundaries, so when you have the verb "to drive" meaning different things in separate sentences, changing both sentence structures might help clarify the semantic difference.

For example, the meaning of "change of possession" admits the two following constructions (in the sense of both sounding okay): "She gave him a nice watch" and "She gave a nice watch to him". However, while "she gave him a headache" sounds fine, "she gave a headache to him" sounds really strange.

In the same sense, "He drove the car to Chicago" does not like being switched to "He drove Chicago the car", suggesting (obviously in this case) that the meaning here is not a change of possession. Really cool stuff!

hal said...

Carlos: Good points. Though I'm not sure I totally agree (with Pinker, that is). It's easy to get mixed up when the nouns themselves imply things... For instance "I drove the car over the bridge" versus "I drove the battleship over the bridge"... it's not the driving that presenting a conflict here. This is more subtle but I would argue the same in the last example of driving the car to Chicago -- here, I think it's actually the preposition that's different. For instance, in Japanese, the two "to"s would be translated differently for "Drove the car to Chicago" and "Gave the gift to Mary".... or in Latin, they'd be inflected differently (if I remember from high school). I think this is a good game to play, but I think you have to be very careful when you do so to make sure that it's actually the verb that's not selecting properly, rather than something else in the sentence.

Bob Carpenter said...

A standard linguistic test of ambiguity (e.g. different senses) versus vagueness (e.g. metaphor) would be coordination of arguments. Consider:

1) John drove a car and a golfball.

The infelicity (linguist speak for "sounds funny") of the coordination leads to the rhetorical construct known as zeugma. The dictionary entry linked above includes the example:

2) On his fishing trip, he caught three trout and a cold.

Bob Carpenter said...

Just about all linguistic interpretation involves metaphor because almost all definitions involve an analogical (i.e. example) component.

The problem with word senses is the same as for any ontology -- there's usually more than one way that makes sense to divide up the world. You can cut at different granularities. You can divide by syntactic and semantic features.

And who's to say that we all share the same senses? If they're something like mixture models we infer from evidence, people could wind up with similar predictions (or understandings) from different underlying organizations of meanings.

Also, the line between a fresh metaphor and a frozen idiom is blurry. As senses become more standardized in a community, they take on their own meaning. For instance, in 2010, nobody expects me to reason metaphorically about a computer "mouse"; I can only guess that the original metaphor involved the wire looking like a tail.

Kenahoo said...

For sense 19 ("We drove a tunnel through the hill") it might be clearer to say "safety concerns forced the mining company to drive a new tunnel through the hill". "Drove" with "a tunnel through the hill" suggests driving a car, which is not what sense 19 is about. It's about "excavating horizontally" according to WordNet.

Marine said...

Defining word senses is a thorny issue indeed....
As a non-native speaker - and okay, maybe as a MT/WSD person too :) - my first reaction when reading the example sentences was to translate them into French. It roughly gives the coarser grained OntoNotes distinctions (except for sense 2 that I would tend to split further), and also highlights literal vs. metaphorical usage: "drive cattle/cars" can be translated as "conduire", but other senses cannot.

Of course, alternate French translations or Latin or Japanese translations might give a different set of senses... So I agree with Bob that any sense inventory is arbitrary.

From a NLP perspective, one way to get around this problem is to focus on lexical substitution and crosslingual tasks: in most applications, what we really need to know is whether two words can be substituted in a given context, not whether they should be tagged with sense X, Y or Z.

fyuval said...

Groucho Marx (quoted in Guy Deutscher's great book The Unfolding of Language).
Deutscher's Chapter 4, A Reef of Dead Metaphors, describes metaphors as a creative force in language. The hypothetical process described by Deutscher is a gradual transition from the concrete to the abstract through metaphors, followed by sometime loss of the middle forms. The word metaphor itself in Greek means "carry towards", which can also describe a carriage or a truck.

hal said...

@Bob: I totally agree ... this is probably why it's so hard to get agreement for WSD stuff.

I'm always amused by examples like the mouse. My favorites are when I "rewind" my DVD or my DVR, when I put stuff in my "glovebox," when I "dial" the phone, etc.

@Kenahoo: Yeah, I know that's what it's supposed to be, but I'm just really not familiar with that sense of the word.

@Marine: I agree, for those of us who speak (or try to speak) >1 language, the natural thing is to translate.

I've always wondered about metaphorical translation. I know of some negative examples. Eg., John Denero said once that their MT system was translating French "chat" into English "spade" and they discovered this was because of the idiom "call a spade a spade" being translated as "call a cat a cat" or something. But that's more idiom than metaphor.

Unfortunately, I'm not sufficiently fluent in other languages to really be able to say what the normal case is. My guess is that lots of the most common metaphors probably translate directly, but there are probably also a lot of less common ones that diverge.

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