Application of the ATT-Meta Metaphor-Understanding System to an Example of the Metaphorical View of MIND PARTS AS

The main aim of this report is to provide a measure of objective evaluati on of ATT-Meta, a system we have implemented for conducting some of the reasoning needed in the under standing of metaphorical utterances. The report thereby also provides some evaluation of the overal l th oretical approach informing ATT-Meta. The approach and system are not described in detail here, but rath er in an accompanying technical report (CSRP-01-05). However, the present report is self-cont ained. Its evaluation of the ATTMeta system consists of showing how the system extracts important tar get-domain information from a particular metaphor example that was found in real discourse. This example rests on the metaphorical view of MIND PARTS AS PERSONS, in which a person or a person’s mind i s viewed as having parts that are themselves persons, or as otherwise containing persons, where these p ersons have their own mental states. The view is extensively used in mundane conversation and text. T h report shows that the system successfully produces major pieces of information conveyed by the example utterance. It does so on the basis of a very limited set of mapping relationships included in ATT-Met a as its long-term knowledge of the metaphorical view. The implementation of the example also helps to v indicate the Map-Extension Minimization stance within the ATT-Meta approach. This stance is that met aphorical mappings should, by default, not be extended to cope with utterance aspects that those mappin gs do ot deal with. Rather, within-source-domain reasoning should be used to link those aspects t o source-domain aspects that the mappings do already deal with.