PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - El Kinani, Fatima
AU  - El Alaoui, Nora
TI  - Conceptual metaphors in the age of AI: inference and analogy, between natural processing and automatic processing
DP  - 2025 Dec 23
TA  - Romanica Olomucensia
PG  - 249--265
VI  - 37
IP  - 2
AID - 10.5507/ro.2025.016
IS  - 18034136
AB  - Language is not always explicit it is also implicit. Indeed, the interpretation of what is left unsaid, as Ducrot said, requires linguistic and extralinguistic information. According to Lakoff and Johnson, metaphors are not just stylistic aspects of language in literature, but also universal strategies of human cognition. The interpretation of conceptual metaphors requires the production of inference; thus, this study aims to examine, through examples, the role of inference in the interpretation of metaphors. It is about assessing the process of metaphorical inference, linking the source domain and the target domain. A comparative analysis is conducted: on the one hand, human natural processing and automatic treatments of metaphorical implicature will be compared on a restricted sample; on the other hand, a comparison will be made between ChatGPT4.0 and the Chinese DeepSeek. The results of the processing of conceptual metaphors show that affective metaphors are uninterpretable by ChatGPT4.0, but it offers a relevant graphical representation, whereas DeepSeek provides examples of metaphors related to the physical and experimental world with a relevant interpretation; however, it cannot offer advanced representations. By comparing the two language models with natural processing, one can argue that AI is a complementary tool and assistant to the human brain.