Fostering metaphorical creativity using computational metaphor identification

摘要

Metaphor is often seen as a mode of creative thinking or as a means of fostering creativity. However, little work has studied creative generation of novel metaphors. This paper explores the use of computational metaphor identification (CMI) to foster creative generation of novel metaphors. CMI is a technique for analyzing textual corpora to identify potential conceptual metaphors. Drawing those metaphors to readers' attention can provide an opportunity to consider alternatives to current metaphors. This paper describes results from a study using CMI to foster metaphorical creativity in the context of science education. The results show that CMI leads to more creative mappings within metaphors. The key contributions of this paper are a demonstration that CMI can be used to foster more original metaphorical reasoning, and, more generally, implications for the study of metaphorical creativity.