Project C04: Metaphors as an explanation tool

Project C04 investigates metaphors as a specific means to make difficult phenomena interpretable. The innovative aspect is to regard both highlighting and hiding processes when metaphors are utilized in explanations. The project aims to understand how metaphors may either facilitate or impede understanding, and how this understanding can be applied in AI systems to construct metaphors. The project contributes to our understanding of explanation spaces and to the principles by which explanations are generated or tailored to the needs of an explainee by making choices in the explanation space, that is, by systematically highlighting and hiding aspects of the explanandum.
Research areas: Psychology, Computer science
Project leaders
Prof. Dr. Ingrid Scharlau, Paderborn University
Prof. Dr. Henning Wachsmuth, Leibniz University Hannover
Staff
Meghdut Sengupta, Leibniz University Hannover
Annedore Wilmes, University Paderborn
Hilfskräfte
Philip Porwol, Paderborn University
Hannah Osthövener, Paderborn University
Publications
Sengupta, M., Alshomary M., and Wachsmuth, H. (2022) Back to the Roots: Predicting the Source Domain of Metaphors using Contrastive Learning. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Figurative Language Processing (FLP), pages 137–142, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.