Aptness is an umbrella term that covers amultitude of issues in the interpretation andgeneration of creative metaphor. In this paperwe concentrate on one of these issues — thenotion of lexical systematicity — and exploreits role in ascertaining the coherence of creativemetaphor relative to the structure of the targetconcept being described. We argue that all elsebeing equal, the most apt metaphors are thosethat resonate most with the way the targetconcept is literally and metaphoricallyorganized. As such, the lexicon plays a key rolein enforcing and recognizing aptness, insofar asthis existing organization will already havebeen lexicalized. We perform our exploration inthe context of WordNet, and describe howrelational structures can be automaticallyextracted from this lexical taxonomy tofacilitate the interpretation of creativemetaphors.
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