"They really are trying to get at what people think using how they talk."

Since language is available in critical mass all over the Internet, researchers will continue to mine this material to promote more efficient marketing or to determine the nature of our hearts and minds. The Atlantic has a new article about an intelligence branch of the government running a program designed to unravel how people around the globe use metaphors. An excerpt from Alexis Madrigal’s article:

“Every speaker in every language in the world uses them effortlessly, and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity wants know how what we say reflects our worldviews. They call it The Metaphor Program, and it is a unique effort within the government to probe how a people’s language reveals their mindset.

‘The Metaphor Program will exploit the fact that metaphors are pervasive in everyday talk and reveal the underlying beliefs and worldviews of members of a culture,’ declared an open solicitation for researchers released last week. A spokesperson for IARPA declined to comment at the time.

IARPA wants some computer scientists with experience in processing language in big chunks to come up with methods of pulling out a culture’s relationship with particular concepts. ‘They really are trying to get at what people think using how they talk,’ Benjamin Bergen, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego, told me. Bergen is one of a dozen or so lead researchers who are expected to vie for a research grant that could be worth tens of millions of dollars over five years, if the team scan show progress towards automatically tagging and processing metaphors across languages.”