Open-Ended Elaborations in Creative Metaphor - Computational Creativity Research: Towards Creative Machines - page 213

there is a source scenario in which a person (standing for the weather) is engaged in
activity of some sort. But personification where a “frame of mind” is used to convey a
particular state of theweather appears to be an unusual elaboration. AGloWbE search
found no instances of “weather” within six words to the left of “frame of mind”. A
web search for “weather” being in a “frame of mind” reported four instances, 8 casting
the weather as being in a “fickle”, “friendly”, “bi-polar”, or “benevolent” frame of
mind. These four examples are creative in the way they qualify the nature of the
weather, by enriching the source scenario in an individual way. They also provide
an important hint about the open-endedness of elaboration. In the case of “bi-polar”,
alternative wording that conveyed a mental state akin to bipolarity would lead to
similar conclusions about the weather. For example, the weather being in an “up and
down frame of mind” would work similarly to mean that the weather is tending to
regularly move between two states. Equally, the “benevolent” case would be replaced
by the weather being in a “frame of mind where it was inclined to dispense largesse
over wide sections of the populace”. There is no boundary round the way in which the
frame of mind could be qualified. This gives great scope for metaphorical creativity.
Some other examples of open-ended and creative metaphor in mundane language
will arise below.
The chapter looks mainly at how an understander (hearer or reader) understands
metaphorical discourse according to the ATT-Meta approach, particularly when it
is creative, rather than at creative metaphor generation, although a feature of ATT-
Meta that helps with generation will be mentioned. Also, the approach leads to a
new suggestion about the form metaphor may take within the mind (as opposed to
within language, pictures, etc.) The suggestion is that, while analogy is involved in
metaphor, and analogical thinking is extremely important in creativity, metaphorical
thinking also has non-analogical aspects that are important in creativity.
A few words about ATT-Meta in general. The name ATT-Meta applies both to
a theoretical account and the implemented AI reasoning system based on it. ATT-
Meta is first and foremost a theoretical processing account of aspects of metaphor
understanding. It can potentially informpsychological modelling of humanmetaphor
understanding or intelligent computer programs for metaphor understanding, and
has certain philosophical implications, some spelled out in Barnden and Wallington
[ 10 ], for the nature of metaphor and metaphor understanding. Thus, in essence, the
approach was developed in order to investigate the fundamental nature of metaphor.
But the approach has been partially implemented in a computer program, a rule-based
uncertain-reasoning systemwritten in Prolog. The working systemdoes not currently
actually accept natural language sentences. Rather, it is a system for handling just
the reasoning and source/target mapping actions that the ATT-Meta approach holds
to be needed for handling a certain broad type of metaphor. 9 The system is not
intended to be definitive as to how the approach should be implemented in computer
8 In Google search result pages.
9 However, in an ongoing EU project ATT-Meta is being combined with a natural language front-end
for interpretation and generation of linguistic strings.