Re: SUO: WordNet Mappings
Hi Ian,
thanks for the mapping paper: will read with interest.
> First, nouns are clearly
> favored in WordNet - there is much more information about nouns that there
> is about other parts of speech. The second reason is that most verbs have a
> nominal form,
well, linguistically it is well known that one of the functions
of nominalisations is to drop a lot of information--e.g., information
about their temporal profile, their configuration of participants/semantic
roles, aspect, and so on--so, at least from my own background
in Natural Language Generation, we stick to events (and the verbal configurations
that express them) as the basic starting point and if justified (from
their use in a text) we can throw away a lot of information and use
a noun, since most nouns behave pretty much the same. This is just to
adopt an event semantics as "basic" whenever we can.
> so that mapping all of the nouns gives you most of the verbal
> > meanings.
well, again, it might have done if, as you say,
> it would be nice to have a pointer from the noun
> synset to the corresponding verb synset, and I hope the WordNet people will
> introduce this at some point.
but they don't. This is probably another reason for moving on to the
EuroWordNet upper structure rather than WordNet. I think these things
have been thought of there more.
There is also the question about the hierarchies of the synsets concerned
with verbs and those concerned with nouns: I think (haven't looked at
these for a while now) these look very different in WordNet, so there
is some different information being taken into consideration.
> However, we are not using this
> structure in our mapping work. We are associating individual synsets with
> SUMO concepts.
This is a relief! :-)
Clearly a lot of interesting stuff here: and a link to WordNet, for all
its (i.e., WordNet's) drawbacks, is obviously a Good Thing. I look forward to
more. There have been some moves to using WordNet information as a lexical
resource for doing Natural Language Generation--I think having a link to
something that is better organised, like the SUMO-to-be, will be a great
help.
Best,
John B.