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.