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"Learning by doing" in pursuit of real-world goals has received much attention from education researchers but has been unevenly supported by mathematics education software at the elementary level, particularly as it involves arithmetic word problems. In this article, we give examples of doing-oriented tools that might promote children's ability to "see" significant abstract structures in mathematical situations. The reflection necessary for such seeing is motivated by activities and contexts that emphasize affective and social aspects. Natural language, as a representation already familiar to children, is key in these activities, both as a means of mathematical expression and as a link between situations and various abstract representations. These tools support children's ownership of a mathematical problem and its expression; remote sharing of problems and data; software interpretation of children's own word problems; play with dynamically linked representations with attention to children's prior connect...

Much of the research on computational metaphor interpretation is based on metaphors that are prevalent in the language being processed. Moreover, the more detailed work in this area tends to focus primarily on specific domains of discourse. Such approaches, while of interest and value, are not adequate to handle novel metaphoric expressions that occur in a context unrestricted by domain, such as an ordinary conversation or a digression from a domain-specific context. This chapter describes MAP (Metaphor Analysis Program), a computer program that processes both novel and conventional cross-modal metaphor without restriction to a particular domain of discourse. MAP relies on the kind of semantic analysis that models what humans are hypothesized to do when they extend a literal meaning to a metaphoric one, especially when there is no clear indication of a discursive context. To do so, the model depends on an analysis of a metaphorically used word in its literal sense and the role of this sense in structuring the topic of the metaphor. Problems of multiple metaphoric interpretations and the uncertainty of constraints on metaphoric coherence are addressed by a number of vivid illustrations.

(1992). The Structure-Mapping Engine: Algorithm and Examples (Book) Metaphor and Symbolic Activity: Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 109-113.

A natural language interface has been developed to facilitate the use of statistical packages. Queries are parsed into “case frames” based on statistical primitives. A rule-based expert system uses the case frame to choose a statistical test and generate a batch file that, when executed, answers the query.

Novel linguistic metaphor can be seen as the assignment of attributes to a topic through a vehicle belonging to another domain. The experience evoked by the vehicle is a significant aspect of the meaning of the metaphor, especially for abstract metaphor, which involves more than mere physical similarity. In this article I indicate, through description of a specific model, some possibilities as well as limitations of computer processing directed toward both informative and experiential/affective aspects of metaphor. A background to the discussion is given by other computational treatments of metaphor analysis, as well as by some questions about metaphor originating in other disciplines. The approach on which the present metaphor analysis model is based is consistent with a theory of language comprehension that includes both the intent of the originator and the effect on the recipient of the metaphor. The model addresses the dual problem of (a) determining potentially salient properties of the vehicle conce...