THE QUANTUM OF NLP
Cognitive Metaphor as a Mind Discovering Device
Svetlana Machova and Jana Kleckova
University of West Bohemia, Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Univerzitni 8, 306 14, Plzen, Czech Republic
Keywords: Semantics, NLP, Free associations, Quantum linguistics, Mind.
Abstract: Our research has been established on the comparative findings from cognitive and computational linguistics,
philosophical and phenomenological mind’s theories, modern physics discoveries and the natural language
semantics dealing with meanings on the quantum level, which is pilot research mentioned as “The Elegant
Mind” project. This project was created for implementing in artificial intelligence metaphoric reasoning
algorithms. We have been particularly studied expressions describing a realm of mind in Czech and English.
The data has been acquired by online Free Association Experiment (FEA) to visualize the latent connection
between particular states of mind. A multilingual mind semantic dependency networks founded on the
knowledge based system of authentic association data has been generated by Gephi dynamic graphs.
1 INTRODUCTION
The Elegant Mind Project (EMP) is knowledge
representation research that uses Free Associations
Test data to create a semantic network of Inner Self
(Mind) from associations to a unique list of
cognitive metaphor stimuli. EMP is a fundamentally
new resource of deep semantic knowledge, a
platform for mind study and optimizing the human
communication process with electronic resource.
Two main methodologies are combined in this
project: Free Association Test (C.G. Jung) and
Cognitive Metaphor Theory of Inner Self (Lakoff,
1980, 1999). This paper proposed an NLP method
representing cognitive dimension of mind based on
the psychoanalytic methodology of Free Association
Test. In the research, we conducted Free Association
Experiment (FAE), giving us access not only to the
diagnosis of psychopathological conditions, but also
to information about the primary ways of thinking,
the totality of mind experience acquired by all
humankind, and to collective unconscious data.
Implemented reasoning model called ATT Meta
developed at Birmingham University “performs a
type of metaphor based reasoning." According to
J.Barnden (1996), fully/fledged science can describe
a mind as it describes itself in natural language.
Author has been concentrated on such metaphoric
notions as MIND PARTS AS PERSONS eg.”One
part of Mike knows that Sally has left for good”, or
MIND AS PHYSICAL SPACES “inner/outer Self",
“Emptiness was killing her." It is obviously not only
in English that cognitive realm representing its states
mentioning: “fringes of consciousness," about “ideas
surfacing at the mind", that we can see mental things
“clearly” or “obscurely” (Barnden 1996).
According to K. Ahrens (2005) huge interest in
embodied cognition has increased the need for
cognitive models reflecting the relationship of the
Inner Self within and out of the physical world. As
W. James noticed we are divided into “spiritual me,
social me and material me“ (Deignan, 2005).
Conceptual Metaphor Theory rejects the notion that
metaphor is a decorative device.
Particularly interesting field of study is metaphor
of Mind as a light. Interesting example in the
literature has been found by J Barnden (1996)
„Feelings have become in this respect like light itself
- wavelike, as they used to say in his physics class.”
Light of the mind enlightens our personality “Shine
with happiness. personality is shining through, to
have dark thoughts”. Smart person in always
associates with bright, clear illuminated mind and its
metaphoric opposite foggy mind creates darkness or
dullness.
Our theory claims that MIND has a LIGHT
nature. On the data gained from FEA and the
examples below we have tried to show common
427
Machova S. and Kleckova J..
THE QUANTUM OF NLP - Cognitive Metaphor as a Mind Discovering Device.
DOI: 10.5220/0003838204270429
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Health Informatics (HEALTHINF-2012), pages 427-429
ISBN: 978-989-8425-88-1
Copyright
c
 2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

sense metaphor contains information which
correlates with quantum physics discoveries gained
last eighty years.
2 METHODS
In contrast with already presented WordNets or
MindNet from Microsoft Research team, a collection
of semantic relations that is automatically extracted
from text data using a broad coverage parser”
(Vandervende 2005) based on existing corpora and
web data. The algorithm describes on immediate
authentic respondent answers for given metaphor on
mind stimuli.
To create and visualize association semantic
network, we used a set of web application tools. A
database was generated in SQL by an original
algorithm in on-line mode. Data were loaded from
the CSV file and visualized with Gephi dynamic
graph. Analyzed data were lemmatized by an SQL
and MS Excel and were classified into 75 primary
semantic dimensions. Cases were grouped using
Microsoft ACCESS. The most frequent answer
contained Czech lexeme byt mimo (sebe) (literal
translation is- to be out of body) which belongs to
the MIND AS (conceptual metaphor and also
correlates with a distracted state of Mind. Or Mind
Entanglement (Radin, 2006)
First, we created a list of 400 stimuli for Free
association Test in the Czech language. The stimuli
appeared to each respondent in a random order, and
she/he had the opportunity to write 0-3 responses in
Czech to each stimulus. This application is used for
writing associations to stimuli which is being
offered, where respondents have to write the first
word or phrase which immediately came into their
mind.
We have classified our data from different points
of view; we were after all interested in the
qualitative findings. Unique associations produce
another cognitive metaphor in connection with these
stimuli. Most of the participants were university
students mostly in humanities field such as history
or philosophy. The linguistics data collected by this
means were intrinsically different from what we
have known about the mind from the neuroscience
which has helped us imagine the cognitive function
of the human mind as an access to a collective
unconsciousness. Despite the relatively greater
variation of the individual responses, there is an
obvious pattern of synchronicity.
Basic statistics were provided online. The
administrator can display either responses
categorized according to respondents or the issues,
where individual responses are sorted according to
the frequency of their occurrence for each stimulus.
This application can be used not only for
psychological, medical and sociological research but
also as a multilingual dataset, where the user only
selects stimuli in the preferred language.
3 EXPERIMENTAL FINDINGS
In the database we have collected 12,673 word
responses for 400 stimuli from almost 200
participants. Primarily, we were interested in
creating a semantic network from obtained data.
Emphasized arrows mean high semantic
dependency. We also examined which stimuli-
response pairs occurred more frequently, which
responses occurred more often, were there any
unexpected connections between certain words,
which answers occurred more often, which stimuli
were semantically clustered by the same answer, and
which stimuli occurred as an answer and in what
context?
Figure 1: Concentrated /distracted semantic network.
Created mind network (eg. Fig 1) gave us a
unique opportunity to discover the probabilistic
nature of mind revealing itself in all languages as
“entangled quantum” (Radin, 2006) particles. At the
quantum level things could be at the multiple places
at the same time, particles can be mired out act like
waves, things could be interconnected even at the
great distances, time is erased, the boundary between
quantum world and class world is unclear,- some
people call it: collapse of the wave function. Very
similar phenomena are described by metaphoric
view. Eg.“No strings attached” “The bond between
them”.
HEALTHINF 2012 - International Conference on Health Informatics
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The conceptual metaphors of MIND AS A
LIGHT below suggest that the metaphorical self -
reflection “see” mind as a bright, shining troughs,
able to lit light field correlate with the nature of
electromagnetic waves described by quantum
physics. Free particles in Broglie’s wave-particle
theory also have both functions as an Essential Self.
It is striking that language had been acquainted with
our Self’s nature as light many thousands years
before Broglie’s discovery. How and where did we
learn this knowledge? How could it happen that
mind a priori knows that our spirits are distracted
(Machova et al, 2010) that we are literally hanging
around, MIND AS INVISIBLE LIGHT WAVES
Czech: Dělat vlny, Russ: Volnovatsja, Engl. lit.
Making waves, Engl.Be upset, worried.
Our mind has a light nature and interaction of
two minds reminds us of an light interference
pattern. When we look at the Fig.2 (Fournier, 2003)
below we can understand why meeting in Czech
calls „se-tkání“- lit. co-binding.
Figure 2: Metaphorical view of Minds Light binding.
As a confirmation conceptual metaphor
presenting mind as a light texture, on the picture
above, we can see the „periodic arrays of light
intensity serve to trap dielectric micron size particles
as well as cold atoms Optical binding is a long range
force (proportional to 1/r) discovered at the Rowland
Institute on Harvard. It allows creating of matter just
by photons exchange (Fournier, 2003).
4 CONCLUSIONS
Empirical findings about the phenomenology of
mind gained from Associative Experiment, has
opened a new dimension of artificial intelligence and
quantum linguistics research, allowing us to create a
link between a collective unconscious level and a
conscious Mind. Essential Self metaphors described
by the association experiment allow us to identify
the main structures of a priori semantic web hidden
beyond the language. Our claim is that a literal
meaning of the cognitive metaphor is not necessarily
arbitrary and metaphorical as we used to think. Their
literal meaning is a huge field of research
discovering hidden structures of the mind.
Literal meaning and literal translation of
cognitive metaphors of mind, which doesn’t usually
make common sense in the visible dimension, is a
universal phenomenon, occurring throughout all
languages; as we have noticed that it is often
metonymy which needs to be uncovered in their full
length. Thus, free association method applied on
other languages equivalent can help us to do it.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Elegant Mind project presented in this paper is
supported by the Czech Science Foundation grant GACR
106/09/0740.
REFERENCES
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Deignan, A., 2005. Metaphor and Corpus Linguistics,
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Fournier, J., 2003. Light binding, Rowland Institute,
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