• Interview on PhilosophyTalk
• ESSLLI'07 Enriched Lexical Ontologies
• ESSLLI'05 Course notes on METAPHOR

Research Mission

Publications

• Cardoso, A., Veale, T., Wiggins, G. (2009)
  Cardoso, A., Veale, T., Wiggins, G. (2009) ’Converging on the divergent: the history (and future) of the international joint workshops in computational creativity’ AI Magazine 30 (3) :15-22. [pdf]

• Veale, T. , Li, Guofu (2009)
  Veale, T., Li, Guofu. (2009). ONTOLOGICAL CLIQUES - Analogy as an Organizing Principle in Ontology Construction. In Proceedings of IC3K/KEOD, The International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management. Madeira, Portugal. [pdf]

• Veale, T.  (2009)
  Veale, T. (2009). Hiding in Plain Sight: Figure-Ground Reversals in Humour. In Cognitive Poetics: Goals, Gains and Gaps, G. Brône and J. Vandaele (eds.), Mouton de Gruyter. [pdf]

• Veale, T. and Hao, Y. (2009)
  Veale, T. and Hao, Y. (2009).  Support Structures for Linguistic Creativity: A Computational Analysis of Creative Irony in Similes.  In proceedings of CogSci 2009, the 31st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Amsterdam. [pdf]

• More

Dorian: Analogical Portraiture

Dorian is a knowledge-base that explores this multiplicity of categorization when dealing with proper-named entities. Dorian’s knowledge-base of proper-named entities is harvested from the Google n-grams, and associates entities with the categories that speakers most commonly attribute to them. Dorian’s knowledge-base is supplemented by the category-system in Wikipedia, which adopts a less subjective, curated approach to categorization.

The Lex-Ecologist

Ecologists study the natural environment of plants and animals. Our plants and animals are words and concepts, and our environments are large text corpora. The Lex-Ecologist allows you to explore the rich textual environment for words provided by the text of the on-line encyclopaedia Wikipedia. Observe the behaviour of concepts in this environment: observe what they do, what is done to them, what they act upon, and how they congregrate into groups.

Jigsaw Bard

The Jigsaw Bard is an online application that allows you to find resonant phrases for a large range of simple properties, like quiet, or for an even larger range of complex blended properties, like quiet and calm. The Bard has already scoured vast amounts of web text to identify phrases that have a resonant quality, and has automatically indexed these phrases on the properties they most poetically suggest. Most phrases are found art in this respect -- they are well-formed fragments of English that the Bard thinks have both a poetic quality and a useful communicative function. But some phrases (shown in blue) have been directly composed by the Bard itself. Have a look and see what you think of the Bard’s compositional abilities.

Aristotle: An Interactive Metaphor Finder

Let Aristotle help you find appropriate metaphors to describe a given person or thing. Simply enter the target for your metaphor (called the tenor in metaphor research), choose a property you would like to accentuate, and Aristotle will select a range of possible vehicles to carry this meaning. Click on any of these vehicles to understand the full import of the metaphor you are about to use.

Sardonicus

Sardonicus is a simile-finder that knows the exemplary properties of different objects in the real world. It has acquired this knowledge by sifting the contents of the web in search of meaningful comparisons. It knows that ninjas are stealthy and that bowling balls are heavy and smooth enough to be called bald. It also has a healthy sense of irony, so it knows that roller-coasters are not exactly a model of consistency, and that turtles are not generally prized for their speed. The similes in Sardonicus are divided into straight-faced "factual" similes and tongue-in-cheek "ironic" similes, and are organized hierarchically using a taxonomy of adjectives.  Try it now, it might put an ironic smile on your face.

Mondrian: Mapping of Names, Descriptions and Roles in Analogy

Mondrian is a knowledge-base of commonplace associations that have been mined from the Google n-grams database of frequent web-content.

Mondrian views the world as a collection of triples, of the form Subject-Relation-Object.

You can query Mondrian to see what triples have a given Subject, Relation or Object (or any combination of these).

For instance, put Rabbi in the Subject field and Mondrian will give you all its triples in which Rabbi is the subject.

When you click on a relation, Mondrian shows you analogies for this relation. Mondrian uses the squaring rule to detect analogies: S1-R-O1 is analogical to S2-R-O2 if Mondrian thinks that S1-like-S2 and O1-like-O2. Hence, Mondrian builds squaring relations between parallel triples.

Click on a column of the relations table to see the table re-sorted with that column as a key.

Mondrian will also show you the common compounds that a subject engages in.

Click here to see Mondrian in action.

DimSum

Different languages tend to represent different cultural and conceptual perspectives on the world. To the originating culture, such lexicalized perspectives may seem entirely conventional and stale, but to another they may well provide fresh and even innovative insights into the meaning and creative uses of words. DimSum aims to mine these insights from the lexical structure of Chinese, a logomorphemic language that exhibits its semantic structure quite openly in its orthographic realization.

ZeitGeist

Language is a dynamic landscape in which words are not fixed landmarks, but unstable signposts that switch directions as archaic senses are lost and new, more topical senses, are gained. Frequently, entirely new lexical signposts are added as newly minted word-forms enter the language.  One can experience the variety and inventiveness of the most creative new words in English with ZeitGeist, a creative neologism generator.

The Analogical Thesaurus

The Analogical Thesaurus is an attempt to create a semantic index of words and ideas that can be accessed using a variety of conceptual perspectives. Besides the traditional alphabetic index (as in conventional dictionaries) and a taxonomic index (e.g., as found in WordNet), the Analogical Thesaurus provides an analogical and metonymic means of browsing through words and ideas.

As presented here, the Analogical Thesaurus has been distilled from a marriage of two resources. The first is HowNet lexical ontology, using analogical techniques described in our group publications. The second is Wikipedia, an on-line open-source encyclopedia, whose rich inter-topic reference structure allows us to extract implicit relationships from HowNet entries and their Chinese orthography.

You can access the Analogical Thesaurus on-line. Be sure to read the help documentation first.

Thesaurus Rex

Concept taxonomies offer a powerful means for organizing knowledge, but this organization must allow for many overlapping and fine-grained perspectives if a general-purpose taxonomy is to reflect concepts as they are actually employed and reasoned about in everyday usage. Think about a term like "tofu" or "robot" -- besides the basic meanings of Food or Robot, these terms evoke different perspectives and categorizations in different contexts and for different people.  For robust natural language understanding (NLU), we require our lexicons/ontologies to appreciate and exploit all of these perspectives.  Thesaurus Rex acquires finely-discriminating taxonomies from the a variety of different starting points, or seeds, via a process of bootstrapping  from three different sources: WordNet, ConceptNet and the web at large.

The Way of Knowledge

A levels-based grid game in which you must use your world knowledge to safely navigate each level to the next progression point. Avoid falling into pits of ignorance when you fail to answer questions correctly. The topology of the game as well as each question/puzzle is computer generated using WordNet.

Play a demo version of this game

Wiki-Wanderer

Another levels-based grid game, in which you must use your world knowledge to find a path between different start/endpoints in Wikipedia (e.g., from Zeus to Haircream). Each level has successively longer paths for you to navigate, but hints are liberally sprinkled around each level.

Play a demo version of this game

Trail-Blazer

This is a game that exploits a player’s knowledge of compound terms in a language. One must blaze a trail through a matrix of words, from the top row to the bottom, forming a chain composed of two-word compound terms. That is, each successive pair of words in the chain must comprise an established two-word phrase, like "queen mother" or "mother goose" (as in the chain "queen mother goose").

Play a demo version of this game