ATT-Meta Project: Metaphor, Metonymy and Mental States

This project mainly concerns metaphor-based reasoning for metaphor understanding, with a new interest in metonymy.

A special concern is the metaphorical (and metonymic) description of mental states.

However, the main focus of the project is on metaphor in general.

A reasoning system called ATT-Meta has been implemented. It performs some of the reasoning needed for understanding metaphorical utterances.

It also performs both ordinary and metaphor-based reasoning about mental states.

Aside from metaphorical considerations, the central approach in ATT-Meta to reasoning about mental states is ``simulative'' reasoning. This is fully combined with non-simulative reasoning about mental states.

All the reasoning is done within a general purpose framework for uncertain reasoning, which has no particular orientation towards mental states or metaphor. The framework is rule-based. Uncertainty is expressed by means of qualitative certainty levels.

The system does not currently take natural language input. Rather, it is given logical expressions that are simplified representations of the contents of small, hypothetical discourse fragments.

Please mail me (J.A.Barnden@cs.bham.ac.uk) if there's anything you'd like to know.


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GRANT SUPPORT

The project was most recently supported by a grant (no. EP/C538943/1) from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of the UK (EPSRC)
[July 2005 - November 2008].

The ATT-Meta work was also an important aspect of the e-drama project, supported by a grant (no. RES-328-25-0009) from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), in association with the EPSRC and with the Department of Trade and Industry, under the PACCIT programme (People at the Centre of Communications and Information Technologies), which is part of the government's academic/industrial LINK funding scheme.

The ATT-Meta project was previously supported by grant GR/M64208 from the EPSRC, and before that in the USA by grants IRI-9101354 and CDA-8914670 from the National Science Foundation of the USA.


PROJECT MEMBERS

Leader:

John Barnden

Colleagues:

Rodrigo Agerri

Sheila Glasbey

Mark Lee

Alan Wallington


THE NAME OF THE SYSTEM AND HOW TO SAY IT

The project, system and theoretical approach are called ``ATT-Meta'' because they are concerned with propositional ATTitudes and with Metaphor-based reasoning.

The name is pronounced like ``atmeta'', not ``a-t-t-meta'' as some people have thought. If the name sounds like that of an Egyptian pharaoh, so much the better.

The system has no connection to any famous telecom company in the USA, as has also been supposed, believe it or not!



PUBLICATIONS

PAPERS on metaphor, from EPSRC grant July 2005 - November 2008 (EP/C538943/1).


(Caution: the following publications lists need updating.
Please see first list, above, for some more recent material.)


PAPERS on metaphor, with no particular orientation towards mental states.

PAPERS on the combined topic of mental states and metaphor.

PAPERS on mental states, with no metaphorical angle.



DATABANK containing examples of the use of metaphors of mind.



Written by John Barnden

Last update 4 March 2009