Spies and metaphors: automatic identification of metaphors for strategic intelligence

Abstract

In May 2011, Wired magazine published a paper under the provocative title “Spies, meet Shakespeare: intel geeks build metaphor motherlode.” This title generates curiosity, as spies and Shakespeare belong to two different “semantic fields.” Although some notable writers, particularly British writers such as W. Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene, belonged to the intelligence community, Shakespeare was probably not one of them. The author of the article, Lena Groeger (2011), introduces the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) – “the mad science unit of the intelligence community” – and its metaphor project, which aims to “exploit the use of metaphors by different cultures to gain insight into their cultural norms.” In fact this project has drawn wide attention; The Economist joined the celebration by publishing the article “Metaphors we do everything by?” (R.L.G. 2011), and other newspapers have published similar stories. IARPA is a relatively new American agency that was established to develop “the next generation of spycrat technologies” (Bhattacharjee 2009). In the context of “spycraft,” metaphor identii cation isn’t the most salient tool. Our images of the spy world are nurtured by Hollywood rather than by the real world. We can imagine agent 007 – James Bond – driving a car that turns into a war machine. We can imagine the tech geeks who operate the most sophisticated technology to locate the place where Jason Bourne, the hero of The Bourne Identity, is calling from. However, we would hardly imagine a spy movie in which a secret agent bursts into the technology geeks’ oi ce shouting, “Urgent! I need the metaphors used by the Iranians to describe the United States.”