Ahrens, Kathleen, Siaw-Fong Chung and Chu-Ren Huang. 2004. “From Lexical Semantics to Conceptual Metaphors: Mapping Principle Verification with WordNet and SUMO.” In Ji, Lua and Wang (eds). Recent Advancement in Chinese Lexical Semantics: Proceedings of 5th Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop (CLSW-5). Singapore: COLIPS. pp. 99-106. 99 From Lexical Semantics to Conceptual Metaphors: Mapping Principle Verification with WordNet and SUMO Kathleen Ahrens National Taiwan University No. 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Road Taipei, 106 Taiwan ahrens@ntu.edu.tw Siaw-Fong Chung National Taiwan University No. 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Road Taipei, 106 Taiwan claricefong6376@hotmail.com Chu-Ren Huang Academia Sinica No.128, Sec. 2, Academia Road, Nankang Taipei, 115 Taiwan churen@sinica.edu.tw Abstract The goal of this paper is to further develop methods for verifying Mapping Principles between source and target domain pairings of conceptual metaphors. Previous work (Ahrens, Chung & Huang, 2003) integrated the Conceptual Mapping Model with an ontology-based knowledge representation (i.e. SUMO) in order to demonstrate that conceptual metaphor analysis could be restricted and eventually, automated. However, that study relied on an operational definition that required a large number of instances of source-target domain pairings in order to determine the most frequent mapping. In this study, we further operationalize the frequency-based definition and examine the possibility of using information derived from WordNet and SUMO to verify Mapping Principles for source-target domain pairings that do not occur frequently enough (if at all) in a corpus. 1 Introduction Lexical resources are central to any natural language processing system and the plethora of multi-lingual resources such as EuroWordNet (EWN) and Academia Sinica’s Bilingual Ontological WordNet (BOW) are based firmly in the lexicon. Recent work in figurative language processing, however, has pointed out shortcomings of these resources for processing of conceptual metaphor. Veale (2003), for example, points out that determining the aptness is dependent upon parameters that are, as yet, hidden. Lonneker (2003) decries the lack of relationship between literal and figurative synsets in WordNet, while Alonge and Castelli (2003) suggest that the EWN Top Ontology needs to be extended with more concepts in order to deal with figurative language, since at this point in time it only notes general semantic distinctions. Ahrens (2002), taking an intuition-based approach, proposed that the linguistic expressions that are used metaphorically can be analyzed in terms of the entities, qualities and functions that can map between a source and a target domain. When these conventionalized metaphorical expressions have been analyzed, an underlying reason for these mappings can then be postulated. This study relied on native speaker intuition regarding what is mapped conceptually from the source to the target domain. For example, in the four examples from the metaphor LOVE IS PLANT, given below, the Mapping Principle (MP) of “Love is understood as plant because plants involve physical growth and love involves emotional growth” was extracted based on the fact that all the examples in some way had to do with growth. 1. (a) liang ren de ai miao zuijin cai gang mengya two people MOD love seedling lately just recently sprout ‘Their love just begins to sprout lately.’ (b) wo dui tade ai-yi jianjian zizhang I for his love gradually grow ‘My love for him has grown gradually.’