Tony Veale

AAAI Conference 2011 Conference Paper

Creative Introspection and Knowledge Acquisition

• Tony Veale
• Guofu Li

ECAI Conference 2010 Conference Paper

Detecting Ironic Intent in Creative Comparisons

• Tony Veale
• Yanfen Hao

Irony is an effective but challenging mode of communication that allows a speaker to express sentiment-rich viewpoints with concision, sharpness and humour. Irony is especially common in online documents that express subjective and deeply-felt opinions, and thus represents a significant obstacle to the accurate analysis of sentiment in web texts. In this paper we look at one commonly used framing device for linguistic irony - the simile - to show how irony is often marked in ways that make it computationally feasible to detect. We conduct a very large corpus analysis of web-harvested similes to identify the most interesting characteristics of ironic comparisons, and provide an empirical evaluation of a new algorithm for separating ironic from non-ironic similes.

KER Journal 2008 Journal Article

A context-sensitive framework for lexical ontologies

• Tony Veale
• YANFEN HAO

Abstract 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).

ECAI Conference 2008 Conference Paper

Talking Points in Metaphor: A Concise Usage-based Representation for Figurative Processing

• Tony Veale
• Yanfen Hao

An effective speaker can use metaphor to communicate 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 this content. We present here a concise corpusderived meaning representation for metaphor processing that captures the most widely-used talking points that are evoked in everyday metaphors and similes. We illustrate how these talking points can be acquired by harvesting the web, and further show how comparable but discretely different talking points can be reconciled during metaphor processing. Finally, by replicating the clustering experiments of [1], we show that talking points yield an especially concise representation of concepts in general.

AAAI Conference 2007 Conference Paper

Comprehending and Generating Apt Metaphors: A Web-driven, Case-based Approach to Figurative Language

• Tony Veale

Examples of figurative language can range from the explicit and the obvious to the implicit and downright enigmatic. Some simpler forms, like simile, often wear their meanings on their sleeve, while more challenging forms, like metaphor, can make cryptic allusions more akin to those of riddles or crossword puzzles. In this paper we argue that because the same concepts and properties are described in either case, a computational agent can learn from the easy cases (explicit similes) how to comprehend and generate the hard cases (nonexplicit metaphors). We demonstrate that the markedness of similes allows for a large case-base of illustrative examples to be easily acquired from the web, and present a system, called Sardonicus, that uses this casebase both to understand property-attribution metaphors and to generate apt metaphors for a given target on demand. In each case, we show how the text of the web is used as a source of tacit knowledge about what categorizations are allowable and what properties are most contextually appropriate. Overall, we demonstrate that by using the web as a primary knowledge source, a system can achieve a robust and scalable competence with metaphor while minimizing the need for hand-crafted resources like WordNet.

ECAI Conference 2006 Conference Paper

Tracking the Lexical Zeitgeist with WordNet and Wikipedia

• Tony Veale

Most new words, or neologisms, bubble beneath the surface of widespread usage for some time, perhaps even years, before gaining acceptance in conventional print dictionaries [1]. A shorter, yet still significant, delay is also evident in the life-cycle of NLP-oriented lexical resources like WordNet [2]. A more topical lexical resource is Wikipedia [3], an open-source community-maintained encyclopedia whose headwords reflect the many new words that gain recognition in a particular linguistic sub-culture. In this paper we describe the principles behind Zeitgeist, a system for dynamic lexicon growth that harvests and semantically analyses new lexical forms from Wikipedia, to automatically enrich WordNet as these new word forms are minted. Zeitgeist demonstrates good results for composite words that exhibit a complex morphemic structure, such as portmanteau words and formal blends [4, 5].

ECAI Conference 2004 Conference Paper

An Intrinsic Information Content Metric for Semantic Similarity in WordNet

• Nuno Seco
• Tony Veale
• Jer Hayes

ECAI Conference 2004 Conference Paper

WordNet Sits the S. A. T. - A Knowledge-Based Approach to Lexical Analogy

• Tony Veale

ECAI Conference 1998 Conference Paper

'Just-in-Time' Analogical Reasoning: A Progressive-Deepening Model of Structure-Mapping

• Tony Veale

IJCAI Conference 1997 Conference Paper

The Competence of Sub-Optimal Theories of Structure Mapping on Hard Analogies

• Tony Veale
• MARK KEANE

ECAI Conference 1992 Conference Paper

Competitive Hypothesis Resolution in TWIG, a Blackboard-Driven Text Understanding System

• Tony Veale
• Padraig Cunningham

ECAI Conference 1992 Conference Paper

Conceptual Scaffolding: Using Metaphors to Build Knowledge Structures

• Tony Veale
• Mark T. Keane

IJCAI Conference 1991 Conference Paper

Organizational Issues Arising from the Integration of the Lexicon and Concept Network in a Text Understanding System

• Pddraig Cunningham
• Tony Veale

A knowledge based system for text understanding will incorporate both lexical and encyclopaedic information. The lexical information is the basis of the parsing process while the encyclopaedic information forms the target representation and is used in the knowledge acquisition process. This paper describes TWIG, a text understanding system where these two knowledge bases arc integrated into one representation. There is some theoretical justification for this and it has the advantage of reducing duplication of information in the system. This integration also has the advantage of making conceptual information available during the parsing process. Most of all this integration of diverse information forms a natural basis for a blackboard architecture.