I've written about two kinds of serial killers: the one who murders people with their own hands and the one that murders people from behind their desk.
Parts of my simple comparison include bits from Caroline Fraser's great book on different kinds of serial killers, Benjamin Nathans's brilliant book on Soviet dissidents, and Ed Zitron's recent blog post and podcast mini-series on 'the business idiot'.
📚 Publication News from CIIT Lab @ IJCAI 2025 Ijcai:
Last week, the paper “The Delta of Though: Channeling Rivers of Commonsense Knowledge in the Sea of Metaphorical Interpretations” by Antonio Lieto, Gian Luca Pozzato and Stefano Zoia has been accepted at the prestigious International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2025) that will be held in Montreal next August (16-22).
📝 Title: The Delta of Though: Channeling Rivers of Commonsense Knowledge in the Sea of Metaphorical Interpretations
🔍 Abstract:
We propose a system called METCL (Metaphor Elaboration in Typicality-Based Compositional Logic) able to generate and identify metaphors by using the TCL reasoning framework, specialized in human-like commonsense concept combination. We show thatMETCL is able to improve both state of-the-art Large Language Models (e.g DeepSeek-R1, GPT-4o, Qwen2.5-Max) and symbolic ones in the task of metaphor identification. Additionally,
we show how the metaphors generated by METCL are generally well accepted by human subjects.
The obtained results are encouraging and pave the way to research in automatic metaphor generation and comprehension based on the assumption that metaphors interpretation can be partially regarded as a categorization problem relying on generative commonsense concept combination.
Four panel meme of Ron from the Parks and Rec tv-show.
1: Metaphors? I hate metaphors!
2: That's why my favourite book is Moby Dick
3: No froo-froo symbolism
4: Just a good, simple tale about a man who hates an animal