Ask Siri to find a math tutor to help you ‘grasp’ calculus and she’s likely to respond that your request is beyond her abilities. That’s because metaphors like ‘grasp’ are difficult for Apple’s voice-controlled personal assistant to, well, grasp. But new UC Berkeley research suggests that Siri and other digital helpers could someday learn the algorithms that humans have used for centuries to create and understand metaphorical language.
Mapping 1,100 years of metaphoric English language, researchers at UC Berkeley and Lehigh University in Pennsylvania have detected patterns in how English speakers have added figurative word meanings to their vocabulary. The results, published in the journal Cognitive Psychology, demonstrate how throughout history humans have used language that originally described palpable experiences such as “grasping an object” to describe more intangible concepts such as “grasping an idea.”
“The use of concrete language to talk about abstract ideas may unlock mysteries about how we are able to communicate and conceptualize things we can never see or touch,” said study senior author Mahesh Srinivasan, an assistant professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. “Our results may also pave the way for future advances in artificial intelligence.”
The findings provide the first large-scale evidence that the creation of new metaphorical word meanings is systematic, researchers said. They can also inform efforts to design natural language processing systems like Siri to help them understand creativity in human language.
“Although such systems are capable of understanding many words, they are often tripped up by creative uses of words that go beyond their existing, pre-programmed vocabularies,” said study lead author Yang Xu, a postdoctoral researcher in linguistics and cognitive science at UC Berkeley.
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