Identifying the Meta-Forms of Situations: A Case-Study in Computational Semiotics

Various tasks of computing meaning involve the identification, representation and processing of interconnected and recurrent patterns known as situations, context, frames or forms. In this paper, the authors propose a novel computational - semiotics approach for addressing various tasks of situation semantics. The approach relies on the dual-space model and the representation of a situation based on domain and function similarity of its constituting parts. The authors illustrate this approach through a worked-out example and test it by automatically by (1) Judging the truth-value of situational propositions and (2) Generating explanations to metaphors.