I come from a tradition of not really believing in word senses. I fondly remember a talk Ed Hovy gave when I was a grad student. He listed the following example sentences and asked each audience member to group them in to senses:
- John drove his car to work.
- We dove to the university every morning.
- She drove me to school every day.
- He drives me crazy.
- She is driven by her passion.
- He drove the enemy back.
- She finally drove him to change jobs.
- He drove a nail into the wall.
- Bill drove the ball far out into the field.
- My students are driving away at ACL papers.
- What are you driving at?
- My new truck drives well.
- He drives a taxi in New York.
- The car drove around the corner.
- The farmer drove the cows into the barn.
- We drive the turnpike to work.
- Sally drove a golf ball clear across the green.
- Mary drove the baseball with the bat.
- We drove a tunnel through the hill.
- The steam drives the engine in the train.
- We drove the forest looking for game.
- Joe drove the game from their hiding holes.
Now, the point of this isn't to try to argue that WordNet is wacky in any way. The people who put it together really know what they're talking about. After all, these senses are all really different, in the sense there really is a deep interprative difference between 1, 2, 3 and 13. It's just sufficiently subtle that unless it's pointed out to you, it's not obvious. There's been a lot of work recently from Ed and others on "consolidating" senses in the OntoNotes project: in fact, they have exactly the same example (how convenient) where they've grouped the verb drive in to seven senses, rather than 22. These are:
- operating or traveling via a vehicle (WN 1, 2, 3, 12, 13, 14, 16)
- force to a position or stance (WN 4, 6, 7, 8, 15, 22)
- exert energy on behalf of something (WN 5, 10)
- cause object to move rapidly by striking it (WN 9, 17, 18)
- a directed course of conversation (WN 11)
- excavate horizontally, as in mining (WN 19)
- cause to function or operate (WN 20)
The point is that there are (at least) two ways of explaining the wide senses of a word like "drive." One is through senses and this is the typical approach, at least in NLP land. The other is metaphor (and yes, that is a different Mark Johnson). I'm not going to go so far as to claim that everything is a metaphor, but I do think it provides an alternative perspective on this issue. And IMO, alternative perspectives, if plausible, are always worth looking at.
Let's take a really simple "off the top of my head" example based on "drive." Let's unrepentantly claim that there is exactly one sense of drive. Which one? It seems like the most reasonable is probably OntoNotes' sense 2; Merriam-Webster claims that drive derives from Old-High-German "triban" which, from what I can tell in about a five minute search, has more to do with driving cattle than anything else. (But even if I'm wrong, this is just a silly example.)
- Obviously we don't drive cars like we drive cattle. For one, we're actually inside the cars. But the whole point of driving cattle is to get them to go somewhere. If we think of cars as metaphorical cattle, then by operating them, we are "driving" them (in the drive-car sense).
- These are mostly literal. However, for "drive a nail", we need to think of the nail as like a cow that we're trying to get into a pen (the wall).
- This is, I think, the most clear metaphorical usage. "He is driving away at his thesis" really means that he's trying to get his thesis to go somewhere (where == to completion).
- Driving balls is like driving cattle, except you have to work harder to do it because they aren't self-propelled. This is somewhat like driving nails.
- "What are you driving at" is analogous to driving-at-thesis to me.
- "Drive a tunnel through the mountain" is less clear to me. But it's also not a sense of this word that I think I have ever used or would ever use. So I can't quite figure it out.
- "Steam drives an engine" is sort of a double metaphor. Engine is standing in for cow and steam is standing in for cowboy. But otherwise it's basically the same as driving cattle.
This reminds me of the annoying thing my comrades and I used to do as children. "I come from a tradition..." Yields "You literally come from a tradition?" (No, I was educated in such a tradition.... although even that you could ask whether I was really inside a tradition.) "A talk Ed Hovy gave..." Yields "Ed literally gave a talk?" (No, he spoke to an audience.) "I drove the golf ball across the field" Yields "You got in the golf ball and drove it across the field?" Sigh. Kids are annoying.
Why should I care which analysis I use (senses or metaphor)? I'm not sure. It's very rare that I actually feel like I'm being seriously hurt by the word sense issue, and it seems that if you want to use sense to do a real task like translation, you have to depart from human-constructed sense inventories anyway.
But I can imagine a system roughly like the following. First, find the verb and it's frame and true literal meaning (maybe it actually does have more than one). This verb frame will impose some restrictions on its arguments (for instance, drive might say that both the agent and theme have to be animate). If you encounter something where this is not true (eg., a "car" as a theme or "passion" as an agent), you know that this must be a metaphorical usage. At this point, you have to deduce what it must mean. That is, if we have some semantics associated with the literal interpretation, we have to figure out how to munge it to work in the metaphorical case. For instance, for drive, we might say that the semantics are roughly "E = theme moves & E' = theme executes E & agent causes E'" If the patient cannot actually execute things (it's a nail), then we have to figure that something else (eg., in this case, the agent) did the actual executing. Etc.
So it seems like the options are: come up with semantics and frames for every sense (this is what's done, eg., in VerbNet). Or, have a single (or small number) of semantics and frames and have some generic rules (hopefully generic!) for how to derive metaphorical uses from them.