Understanding Metonymies in Discourse

Markert and Hahn’s Critique of Earlier Approaches

• Preferring literal interpretation first leads to inadequate results under incremental parsing conditions unless expensive backtracking is granted.
• Some cases of metonymy do not violate selection restrictions (“He doesn’t like Shakespeare.”)
• Some selection restriction violations have nothing to do with metonymy (“The shirt was waiting for him...”)
• Some metonyms can only be resolved by taking a broader, multi-sentence context into account (“I saw this butterfly fall. I said to myself: Similar is my destiny. [….] Like this caterpillar I have crawled around in the mud.”)

Markert and Hahn’s Approach to Computational Metonymy Resolution

• Treat literal and figurative interpretations on an equal basis
• Constrain interpretations according to consistency with world knowledge and intrasentential context, e.g., selection restrictions
• Prefer interpretations that preserve referential cohesion
• Prefer interpretations that conform to known relationship patterns
• Prefer interpretations that fulfill aptness conditions

Equality of literal and figurative interpretations

• Markert and Hahn dispute idea that figurative language represents a violation of communicative norms
• They claim that considering literal and figurative interpretations simultaneously is more in line with current research on human parsing behavior
• They point to ways in which metonymy resolution can aid in the resolution of literal language phenomena, especially in nominal anaphora resolution

Consistency with world knowledge and intrasentential context

• Knowledge of relationships between concepts
• Selection restriction violations (and related syntactic violations) are taken into account, but literal interpretations are not necessarily favored over metonymic ones when no selection restrictions are violated

Referential cohesion

• More significant criterion than resolution of selection restriction violations is choosing interpretations that maximize the (intra-sentential and inter-sentential) cohesion among referents (includes anaphora)