Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2019
The view that metaphor plays a fundamental structural role in organizing our conceptual systems, ... more The view that metaphor plays a fundamental structural role in organizing our conceptual systems, rather than serving a deviant rhetorical effect, is now generally accepted. Indeed, this idea drives many recent computational models (Weiner , 1984; Martin, 1990; Way, 1991;Veale & Keane, 1992a, 1992b). However, these analyses are based on the de-contextualised "contents" of the metaphor and ignore the communicative context in which it is uttered. Additionally, Davidson (1979) has warned against confusing the content of a metaphor with the intended effect of a metaphor. In his view, metaphor is not a carrier of meaning, but a recipe from which meaning is constructed. The real meaning of a metaphor lies in the changes it makes to belief structures of the hearer/reader.
Conceptual blending is a complex cognitive phenomenon whose instances range from the humdrum to t... more Conceptual blending is a complex cognitive phenomenon whose instances range from the humdrum to the pyrotechnical. Most remarkable of all is the ease with which we humans regularly understand and produce complex blends. While this facility will doubtless elude our best efforts at computational modeling for some time to come, there are practical forms of conceptual blending that are amenable to computational exploitation right now. In this chapter we introduce the notion of a conceptual mash-up, a robust form of blending that allows a computer to creatively reuse and extend its existing commonsense knowledge of a topic. We show also how a repository of such knowledge can be harvested automatically from the web, by targeting the casual questions that we pose to ourselves and to others every day. By acquiring its world knowledge from the questions of others, a computer can eventually learn to pose introspective questions of its own, in the service of its own creative mash-ups.
Creativity – whether in humans or machines – is more than a matter of simple creation. To be “cre... more Creativity – whether in humans or machines – is more than a matter of simple creation. To be “creative” implies an ability to do more than invent, but an ability to recognize and appreciate the inventions of others. After all, the ability to recognize surprising value in the efforts of others is the same ability we use to guide our own creative efforts. Solipsistic creativity is rare indeed, and most creativity relies on an audience that is creative enough to value our efforts. Of what value is an ability to e.g. speak ironically if we cannot also understand or appreciate the irony of others? The goal of imbuing computers with creative abilities must thus include a sub-goal of enabling computers to recognize and respond appropriately to the creativity of others. As computers are increasingly used to analyze the burgeoning texts of the world-wide-web, the ability to automatically detect and analyze the linguistic creativity of speakers has become more important than ever. In this pap...
ABSTRACT Language affords a great many opportunities for the intelligent reuse of linguistic cont... more ABSTRACT Language affords a great many opportunities for the intelligent reuse of linguistic content. Rather than always putting our own thoughts into our own words, we often convey feelings through the words of others, by citing, quoting, mimicking, borrowing, varying or ironically echoing what others have already said. Social networking platforms such as Twitter elevate linguistic reuse into an integral norm of digital interaction. On such platforms, who you follow and what you re-tweet can say as much about you as the clothes you wear or the art you hang on your walls. But not everyone that is worth following is human, and not everything that is worth re-tweeting was first coined by a real person. More and more of the witty and thought-provoking content on Twitter is generated by bots, artificial systems that write their own material and vie for our attention just as humans do. Real people knowingly follow artificial bots for reasons that are subtle and diverse, but a significant reason is surely Twitter itself. This paper explores Twitter as a smart environment for automated wit, and describes the mechanics of a wittily inventive new Twitterbot named @MetaphorMagnet. 1 We Can (Re)Tweet It For You Wholesale The limitations on text length imposed by micro-blogging services such as Twitter do nothing to dampen our ardour for creative language. Indeed, such limitations further incentivize the use of creative devices such as metaphor, analogy and irony, as forms such as these allow us to interact in ways that are witty, memorable and concise. As a principally textual medium, Twitter supports all of the same compression strategies as written language, but also adds some that are uniquely its own. Hashtags, for instance, allow their originators to crystalize an emerging topic or movement into a single term, thus allowing followers to hop onto an ever-accelerating bandwagon by appending the hashtag du jour – such as #CancelColbert or #GamerGate – to their tweets. Twitter also encourages its users to reuse, re-purpose and disseminate the tweets of others via a simple re-tweeting mechanism. Re-tweeting is an action that creates added value for the originator of a tweet and those that pass it along: for the former, it allows their texts to reach a wider audience, and of latter it makes content intermediaries who – as self-appointed social sensors – interactively filter what is worthy of greater attention. More and more, however, the texts that are so anointed by successive re-tweeting are not the texts of human writers but of artificial content-producers called Twitterbots.
ABSTRACT We all share the same world, but are free to formulate and argue for our own interpretat... more ABSTRACT We all share the same world, but are free to formulate and argue for our own interpretations of this shared reality. For different agents will grant differing degrees of importance to the same facts and norms. We cannot experiment on human cultures the way scientists experiment on cell cultures, but we can construct thought experiments that imagine the consequences of otherwise impossible changes. Successful thought experiments do not change the world, but change the way we see the world. This paper describes Gedanken-style reasoning in an AI system that allows a computer to understand, or at least speculate on, the surprising causal interactions between apparently unrelated concepts. This system ponders alternate worlds in which the amount of a conceptual ingredient [X] is increased or decreased, to see what unexpected and apparently incongruous effects might arise from this change. Our goal is to construct a creative generator of novel what-if scenarios that can be used in the generation of perspective-shaping stories, poems and jokes.
An effective speaker can use metaphor to communi- cate a wealth of propositions and affective att... more An effective speaker can use metaphor to communi- cate a wealth of propositions and affective attitudes with a single juxtaposition of ideas (12,8,6,10,7,3,15). But as such, an effective metaphor requires effective communication, which in turn requires that the speaker has a clear idea of the content to be communicated, and an equally clear understanding of which conceptual vehicles best communicate
Human categorization is neither a binary nor a context-free process. Rather, the criteria that go... more Human categorization is neither a binary nor a context-free process. Rather, the criteria that govern the use and recognition of certain concepts may be satisfied to different degrees in different contexts. In light of this reality, the idealized, static structure of a lexical-ontology like WordNet appears both excessively rigid and unduly fragile when faced with real texts that draw upon different contexts to communicate different world-views. In this paper we describe a syntagmatic, corpus-based approach to redefining the concepts of a lexical-ontology like WordNet in a functional, gradable and context-sensitive fashion. We describe how the most diagnostic properties of concepts, on which these functional definitions are based, can be automatically acquired from the Web, and demonstrate how these properties are more predictive of how concepts are actually used and perceived than properties derived from other sources (such as WordNet itself).
Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2019
The view that metaphor plays a fundamental structural role in organizing our conceptual systems, ... more The view that metaphor plays a fundamental structural role in organizing our conceptual systems, rather than serving a deviant rhetorical effect, is now generally accepted. Indeed, this idea drives many recent computational models (Weiner , 1984; Martin, 1990; Way, 1991;Veale & Keane, 1992a, 1992b). However, these analyses are based on the de-contextualised "contents" of the metaphor and ignore the communicative context in which it is uttered. Additionally, Davidson (1979) has warned against confusing the content of a metaphor with the intended effect of a metaphor. In his view, metaphor is not a carrier of meaning, but a recipe from which meaning is constructed. The real meaning of a metaphor lies in the changes it makes to belief structures of the hearer/reader.
Conceptual blending is a complex cognitive phenomenon whose instances range from the humdrum to t... more Conceptual blending is a complex cognitive phenomenon whose instances range from the humdrum to the pyrotechnical. Most remarkable of all is the ease with which we humans regularly understand and produce complex blends. While this facility will doubtless elude our best efforts at computational modeling for some time to come, there are practical forms of conceptual blending that are amenable to computational exploitation right now. In this chapter we introduce the notion of a conceptual mash-up, a robust form of blending that allows a computer to creatively reuse and extend its existing commonsense knowledge of a topic. We show also how a repository of such knowledge can be harvested automatically from the web, by targeting the casual questions that we pose to ourselves and to others every day. By acquiring its world knowledge from the questions of others, a computer can eventually learn to pose introspective questions of its own, in the service of its own creative mash-ups.
Creativity – whether in humans or machines – is more than a matter of simple creation. To be “cre... more Creativity – whether in humans or machines – is more than a matter of simple creation. To be “creative” implies an ability to do more than invent, but an ability to recognize and appreciate the inventions of others. After all, the ability to recognize surprising value in the efforts of others is the same ability we use to guide our own creative efforts. Solipsistic creativity is rare indeed, and most creativity relies on an audience that is creative enough to value our efforts. Of what value is an ability to e.g. speak ironically if we cannot also understand or appreciate the irony of others? The goal of imbuing computers with creative abilities must thus include a sub-goal of enabling computers to recognize and respond appropriately to the creativity of others. As computers are increasingly used to analyze the burgeoning texts of the world-wide-web, the ability to automatically detect and analyze the linguistic creativity of speakers has become more important than ever. In this pap...
ABSTRACT Language affords a great many opportunities for the intelligent reuse of linguistic cont... more ABSTRACT Language affords a great many opportunities for the intelligent reuse of linguistic content. Rather than always putting our own thoughts into our own words, we often convey feelings through the words of others, by citing, quoting, mimicking, borrowing, varying or ironically echoing what others have already said. Social networking platforms such as Twitter elevate linguistic reuse into an integral norm of digital interaction. On such platforms, who you follow and what you re-tweet can say as much about you as the clothes you wear or the art you hang on your walls. But not everyone that is worth following is human, and not everything that is worth re-tweeting was first coined by a real person. More and more of the witty and thought-provoking content on Twitter is generated by bots, artificial systems that write their own material and vie for our attention just as humans do. Real people knowingly follow artificial bots for reasons that are subtle and diverse, but a significant reason is surely Twitter itself. This paper explores Twitter as a smart environment for automated wit, and describes the mechanics of a wittily inventive new Twitterbot named @MetaphorMagnet. 1 We Can (Re)Tweet It For You Wholesale The limitations on text length imposed by micro-blogging services such as Twitter do nothing to dampen our ardour for creative language. Indeed, such limitations further incentivize the use of creative devices such as metaphor, analogy and irony, as forms such as these allow us to interact in ways that are witty, memorable and concise. As a principally textual medium, Twitter supports all of the same compression strategies as written language, but also adds some that are uniquely its own. Hashtags, for instance, allow their originators to crystalize an emerging topic or movement into a single term, thus allowing followers to hop onto an ever-accelerating bandwagon by appending the hashtag du jour – such as #CancelColbert or #GamerGate – to their tweets. Twitter also encourages its users to reuse, re-purpose and disseminate the tweets of others via a simple re-tweeting mechanism. Re-tweeting is an action that creates added value for the originator of a tweet and those that pass it along: for the former, it allows their texts to reach a wider audience, and of latter it makes content intermediaries who – as self-appointed social sensors – interactively filter what is worthy of greater attention. More and more, however, the texts that are so anointed by successive re-tweeting are not the texts of human writers but of artificial content-producers called Twitterbots.
ABSTRACT We all share the same world, but are free to formulate and argue for our own interpretat... more ABSTRACT We all share the same world, but are free to formulate and argue for our own interpretations of this shared reality. For different agents will grant differing degrees of importance to the same facts and norms. We cannot experiment on human cultures the way scientists experiment on cell cultures, but we can construct thought experiments that imagine the consequences of otherwise impossible changes. Successful thought experiments do not change the world, but change the way we see the world. This paper describes Gedanken-style reasoning in an AI system that allows a computer to understand, or at least speculate on, the surprising causal interactions between apparently unrelated concepts. This system ponders alternate worlds in which the amount of a conceptual ingredient [X] is increased or decreased, to see what unexpected and apparently incongruous effects might arise from this change. Our goal is to construct a creative generator of novel what-if scenarios that can be used in the generation of perspective-shaping stories, poems and jokes.
An effective speaker can use metaphor to communi- cate a wealth of propositions and affective att... more An effective speaker can use metaphor to communi- cate a wealth of propositions and affective attitudes with a single juxtaposition of ideas (12,8,6,10,7,3,15). But as such, an effective metaphor requires effective communication, which in turn requires that the speaker has a clear idea of the content to be communicated, and an equally clear understanding of which conceptual vehicles best communicate
Human categorization is neither a binary nor a context-free process. Rather, the criteria that go... more Human categorization is neither a binary nor a context-free process. Rather, the criteria that govern the use and recognition of certain concepts may be satisfied to different degrees in different contexts. In light of this reality, the idealized, static structure of a lexical-ontology like WordNet appears both excessively rigid and unduly fragile when faced with real texts that draw upon different contexts to communicate different world-views. In this paper we describe a syntagmatic, corpus-based approach to redefining the concepts of a lexical-ontology like WordNet in a functional, gradable and context-sensitive fashion. We describe how the most diagnostic properties of concepts, on which these functional definitions are based, can be automatically acquired from the Web, and demonstrate how these properties are more predictive of how concepts are actually used and perceived than properties derived from other sources (such as WordNet itself).
We praise our machines for their consistency, their precision and their speed, but never for thei... more We praise our machines for their consistency, their precision and their speed, but never for their creativity or their insight. And why should we? Creativity is a very human-centric concept, after all, and the popular imagination has good reasons for placing humans and machines at opposite ends of the creativity spectrum. If we want our machines to exhibit the kinds of behavior that humans call creative, we shall just have to build (or teach) our machines to think more like we do. So it can come as a surprise then to learn that the converse is also true: humans can often be more creative by learning and choosing to act like machines! Hand-made By Machines explores the fascinating ramifications of this controversial claim, by exploring the surprisingly productive middle ground between the worlds of human and machine creativity.
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