The frequent and conventional use of non-literal language has been a major stumbling block for natural languages processing systems since the early machine translator efforts. Metaphor, metonymy and indirect speech acts are among the most troublesome phenomena, Recent computational efforts addressing these problems have taken an approach that emphasizes the use of systematic knowledge about non-literal language convention. This work will construct the MetaBank,: an empirically derived and theoretically motivated knowledge-base of English metaphorical conventions. More generally, this effort can be seen as an attempt to develop methodologies for empirically capturing language conventions in usable knowledge-base forms.
