Grasping metaphors: Lexical semantics in metaphor analysis

Metaphors represent to date an extraordinary challenge for computational linguistics. Dealing with metaphors has relevant consequences on our ability to build agents and systems that understand Natural Language and text documents: annotating metaphoric constructions by linking the metaphor elements to existing resources is a crucial step to make text documents more easily accessible by machines. Our approach tackles metaphors by considering concepts and their abstractness. We report the encouraging results obtained in a preliminary experimentation; we elaborate on present limitations, and individuate the needed improvements, which will be the base for future work.