Events Calendar

NL Seminar-Towards the Interpretation of Metaphoric Language

Speaker: Jonathan Gordon, USC/ISI

Talk Title: Towards the Interpretation of Metaphoric Language

Series: Natural Language Seminar

Abstract: Understanding what people mean when they use metaphoric language is a central problem in natural language understanding. Metaphors give a partial understanding of one kind of experience in terms of another, highlighting similarities and hiding differences. In this talk, I give an overview of the problems posed by metaphoric language. I then describe ongoing crosslinguistic work on the knowledge-based interpretation of metaphors by abductive inference. This work moves us toward a better understanding not only of what people are saying with metaphors but also how the metaphors used by groups of people (e.g., the supporters and opponents of gun control) expose their different world views.


Biography: Jonathan Gordon is a postdoctoral researcher at the USC Information Sciences Institute, where he is advised by Jerry Hobbs. His 2014 doctoral dissertation, 'Inferential Commonsense Knowledge from Text', was supervised by Lenhart Schubert at the University of Rochester. Jonathan's research interests include natural language understanding, semantics, and knowledge extraction

Host: Aliya Deri and Kevin Knight

More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Peter Zamar

Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/