Moving Right Along: A Computational Model of Metaphoric Reasoning about Events

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 16

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 16

Cognitive Systems

This paper describes the results of an implemented computational model that cashes out the belief that reasoning about abstract events and actions relies on metaphoric projections of embodied primitives. The specific task addressed is the interpretation of simple causal narratives in the domains of Politics and Economics. The stories are taken from newspaper articles in these domains. When presented with a surface-parsed version of these narratives as input, the system described is able to generate commonsense inferences consistent with the input. Our results show the surprising number, variety, and subtlety of roles played by embodied features in processing narratives about abstract plans and actions.