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US Intelligence Agency to Compile Mountain of Metaphors
coondoggie writes "Researchers with the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity want to build a repository of metaphors. You read that right. Not just American/English metaphors mind you but those of Iranian Farsi, Mexican Spanish and Russian speakers. Why metaphors? 'Metaphors have been known since Aristotle as poetic or rhetorical devices that are unique, creative instances of language artistry (for example: The world is a stage; Time is money). Over the last 30 years, metaphors have been shown to be pervasive in everyday language and to reveal how people in a culture define and understand the world around them,' IARPA says."
Darmok and Jilad at Tanagra, anyone?
What we need here is a database of really bad analogies. Keep it somewhere safe.
Imagine putting it in the locked glove compartment in a car.
Task Mangler
Nope. A simile (you suck at spelling, by the way) is "X is like Y", whereas a metaphor is "X is Y". So when I say "your face looks like a horse's ass", I'm insulting you with a simile, but when I say "your brain is a black hole - things go in, and are lost to all time and space", I'm insulting you with a metaphor. Both of those (similes and metaphors) are examples of a broader category of analogies.
Time is money
Except that it's not. Money is a renewable resource: time isn't.
People taking metaphors and treating them like synonyms or taking the metaphorical figure of speech as literal meaning.
And next thing you know, we're having holy wars, inquisition, genocide...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Don't you mean.. cunning linguists? I'd lick to see them try.
which is totally what she said
The OA quotes IARPA (DARPA for intelligence gathering):
"For decision makers to be effective in a world of mass communication and global interaction, they must understand the shared concepts and worldviews of members of other cultures of interest."
Horse hockey.
No computer can help a human understand a simile, much less an abstraction that's often in the guise of a complex historical or literary reference (i.e. metaphor). So what is the *real* purpose for this 5 year spy program?
First, metaphors are a great identifier of individual writing styles. The trick though is to recognize *when* a word is being used as a metaphor. Tagging a word like 'lion' as trackworthy works only when you know when the word was not meant literally.
Second, and more likely, from snippets of some of Bin Laden's recently unearthed messages, it's clear that Al-Qaeda is using metaphorical code phrases to refer to plans and goals rather than explicit sentences. Part of this program is probably intended to recognize syntactic (and maybe semantic) variations on a given metaphor so it can be recognized and tracked across multiple messages from different people.
So despite IARPA's dumbass lie about 'encouraging greater cultural understanding', this is yet another signals intelligence target tracking program.
I can't imagine the volume of data that the intelligence agencies must weed through, especially if they're monitoring text or voice-to-text.
Skipping over things like "beat some sense into him," or "bringing a knife to a gun fight," or the somewhat infamous "O'Keeffe & Company delivers a rifle shot at critical business, technology, and investment audiences," or even just flagging them as possible metaphors, would be incredibly helpful.
I can only imagine how difficult this would be when monitoring other cultures, languages, idioms, etc. I hope they make this database public, although it's a dim hope. It'd be a great trove of cultural information for the entire planet, not just intelligence agencies.
Metaphors aren't just linguistic expressions or indicators of writing styles. Very often, linguistic metaphors are indicators of how people conceptualize the world. For example, people have spacial metaphors in their brains for concepts like "time" that are indicated by expressions like "going forward".
One interesting example of how cognitive metaphors shape or reflect worldviews is the current budget debate in the United States. Very often, proponents of austerity will use "family" metaphors to make their point. If the government is *not* like a family (for example, because a family doesn't have the same amount of control over its "means" as a government, or because parents don't typically fund themselves by taxing their children), then the points being made are quite possibly flawed.
Cognitive metaphors are so prevalent in the human brain that I don't think it's a huge overstatement to say that you can understand people by understanding their metaphors.
Oh, I suspect they've had that one down for at least a couple decades. I think the issue is more along the lines of intentional obfuscation like "If things thaw any further the queen's gonna be entering the sunset years and even Lassie won't be able to find that well. I hear the winds of change are callin' Vinny to bring the misses on a fishing trip. Its going to be a fine boat ride all hook, line and 'sink-her.... hahaha'" The combination of mismatched metaphors makes it difficult for a computer to analyze the conversation effectively. While it is easy enough for the computer to flag it as suspicious it might be difficult to categorize in an automated fashion: is it about royalty, fishing, murder, weather, old television reruns or a pointless nonsense conversation?
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