The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a spy version of DARPA under the director of National Intelligence, is working on something called The Metaphor Program, reported cnet.

The program is meant to "exploit the fact that metaphors are pervasive in everyday talk and reveal the underlying beliefs and worldviews of members of a culture."

It's usually difficult for natural language processing software to comprehend figurative language.

Researchers will apparently identify and define metaphors from English, Farsi, Spanish, and Russian texts and compile them into a database. But computers will do most of the work.

The first phase of the five-year program will "develop automated tools and techniques for recognizing, defining, and categorizing linguistic metaphors." Analysts would later compare subjects' statements to the database to try to determine their intentions.

Project manager Heather McCallum-Bayliss has suggested that words used by Israelis and Palestinians or China and Taiwan to describe world events could be analyzed as an example. Statements by extremist leaders could also be studied for the effect of metaphors on followers.

One of the goals of the Metaphor Program is to deliver "a functional prototype that demonstrates the automated handling of data, discovery, and semantic definition of metaphors."