Natural Language Processing for Arabic Metaphors: A Conceptual Approach

• Published in: Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Systems and Informatics 2016 Vol. 533; pp. 170 - 181
• Main Authors: Alkhatib, Manar, Shaalan, Khaled
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2016; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing
• Subjects: Arabic; Artificial intelligence; Dialect arabic; Holy qur’an; Metaphors; Modern standard arabic; Natural language processing
• ISBN: 3319483072; 9783319483078
• ISSN: 2194-5357; 2194-5365
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-48308-5_17

Metaphor is a literary device that allows us to express a concept in terms of another. In other words, it is based on similarity between concepts. Metaphorical expressions represent a great variety and they are used in conventional metaphors, which we reproduce and comprehend every day, poetic, novel, and Holy Qur’an. The use of metaphor is ubiquitous in natural language text and it is a serious bottleneck in automatic text understanding, and developing methods to identify and deal with metaphors is an open problem in Arabic natural language processing, especially Machine Translation. Due to the complexities involved in metaphor, it semantically influenced the meaning of machine-translated text. This makes metaphor an important research area for computational and cognitive linguistics, and its automatic identification and interpretation is indispensable for any semantics-oriented Arabic natural language processing. In this paper, we present the challenges of Arabic NLP of metaphors, which is very important in developing a computational NLP-based system for in Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic and Dialect Arabic. We also highlight main problems that arises when translating an Arabic metaphor to another language.