Darmok and Jalad on the Internet: the importance of metaphors in natural languages and natural language processing

In a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, Cpt. Picard is captured and trapped on a planet with an alien captain who speaks a language incompatible with the universal translator, based on their societal historical metaphors. According to Shapiro (2004), the concept of a universal translator removes everything alien from alien languages, and since the Tamarian language refers only to their historical and cultural archetypes, Picard can only establish dialogue by invoking human analogues, such as Gilgamesh. The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, we will tie such communication to standard cognitive models in cognitive linguistics, pioneered by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and Lakoff (1987). Second, we will show that metaphorical imaging resembling the Tamarian language is already present in our culture, by analyzing Dawkins's (1982) notion of a meme, who presupposes that memes as cultural living structures physically reside in the brain, and comparing that to a common format of a meme in pop culture. We will also contrast this concept with living natural languages such as Wolaytta, using a great number of proverbs, which can be seen as desemanticized metaphors that are used to embody different domains of the social realm of life (Make et al. 2014). Third, we will compare the notion of such a language with the current state of machine-learning and deep-learning techniques for natural language processing of metaphorical phrases, pinpointing that even deep learning today is powerless without sufficient training datasets (cf. Perifanos et al. 2020) or specific known word contexts and embeddings (Rei et al. 2017), compared to the same situation the universal translator was faced with when dealing with the Tamarian language.