Abstract
This paper describes a statistical approach to the interpretation of metonymy. In metonymy, the name of one thing (the source) is substituted for that of another related to it (the target). For example, in Souseki wo gornu (read a Souseki), the source'a Souseki'is substituted for the target'a novel written by Souseki. In this case, they are related by an Artist for Artform relation. The method in this paper follows the procedure below in interpreting a metonymy.
(1) Given a metonymynoun A, case-marker R, predicate V, nouns related to the source A are collected in a corpus.
(2) From the collected nouns, a candidate for the target that satisfies the constraints imposed by R and V is selected by applying a statistical criterion.
The method was tested experimentally. It was shown that a corpus is valuable for extracting nouns that are related to a given source and it was also shown that the proposed statistical criterion can select a good target from the extracted nouns. The precision of the experiment, when based on a rigorous judgment, was 0.47 and when based on a less rigorous judgment it was 0.65. The effectiveness of the proposed method has thus been demonstrated.
