Understanding Metonymies in Discourse

Example

• “We also tested the printer Epson EPL-5600. I liked the laser, as its printouts were excellent.”
• Path Finder identifies paths such as (Laser Part-of Laser Printer Has-model Epson EPS-5600),(Epson Has-product Epson EPL-5600), (Epson EPS-5600 Producer-for-product Epson), etc. and forms paths that include ones that resolve metonymic relation between “Epson EPS-5600” and “laser” and anaphoric relation between “its” and “laser” (and ultimately between “its” and “Epson EPS-5600”)

Conclusions

• Markert and Hahn’s approach resolves metonyms that systems relying solely on repair of intrasentential selection restriction violations do not address
• Their approach focuses on treating literal and figurative language on an equal basis and maximizing:
• Consistency with world knowledge and intra-sentential context
• Referential cohesion
• Conformity to known relationship schema
• Aptness of referents
• Does not handle “logical metonymy” (where a noun stands for the activity described by an absent noun: “John began the book”) or metonymy that depends crucially on certain kinds of world knowledge (e.g., Christopher Marlowe saying “I don’t like Shakespeare”)
• Planned future work includes obtaining new metonymic relationship patterns from corpora