An Implemented System for Metaphor-Based Reasoning, With Special Application to Reasoning about Agents

Abstract

An implemented system called ATT-Meta (named for propositional ATTitudes and Metaphor) is sketched. It performs a type of metaphor-based reasoning. Although it relies on built-in knowledge of specific metaphors, where a metaphor is a conceptual view of one topic as another, it is flexible in allowing novel discourse manifestations of those metaphors. The flexibility comes partly from semantic agnosticism with regard to metaphor, in other words not insisting that metaphorical utterances should always have metaphorical meanings. The metaphorical reasoning is integrated into a general uncertain reasoning framework, enabling the system to cope with uncertainty in metaphor-based reasoning. The research has focused on metaphors for mental states (though the algorithms are not restricted in scope), and consequently throws light on agent descriptions in natural language discourse, multi-agent scenarios, personification of non-agents, and reasoning about agents’ metaphorical thoughts. The system also naturally leads to an approach to chained metaphor.KeywordsLiteral MeaningBelief AscriptionImplement SystemConversion RuleSimulative ReasoningThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.