Re: SUO: Multi-Source Ontology (MSO) Draft Ballot Question
Philippe,
I guess we disagree about the purpose of WordNet. One factual
correction though - SUMO has been ported to WN 2.0, and the link are
available at the WordNet site.
Adam
At 07:48 PM 1/29/2004 +1000, Philippe Martin wrote:
> > WordNet synsets are language constructs, not concepts, and the links among
> > synsets are correct linguisticaly, but not philosophically.
>
>A synset represents "one of the meanings of the words in the set". Thus,
>it does represent a concept. WordNet has 2 kinds of links: lexical links
>between words (e.g. "antonym") and semantic links between synsets (e.g.
>"hypernym"). To re-use WordNet for knowledge representation, you have to
>give a logical interpretation to each kind of semantic links and thus
>assume that most hypernym links are genuine "generalization" links
>(i.e. subtypeOf links or instanceOf links), possibly distinguish
>between subtypeOf and instanceOf links (which I did), and correct
>the links that you find incorrect from a logical and semantic viewpoint.
>
>This is stressed by the first sentence of my article about my integration
>of WordNet (http://www.webkb.org/doc/papers/iccs03/):
> This article presents the transformation of the noun-related part of WordNet
> into a genuine "lexical ontology" to support knowledge representation,
> sharing and retrieval within a knowledge base or on the Web, i.e.
> to support "knowledge creation and communication".
>
>Thus, I gave category identifiers (as concise and clear as possible) to the
>synsets (and that alone is important; many teams, including the DOLCE team,
>had to generate identifiers for WordNet categories).
>For what I call the content-oriented links of WordNet (e.g. substance and
>meronym), I assumed the following interpretation:
> when such a link L (say the meronym, which I interpret as pm#spatial_part)
> connects a source category S to a destination category D, it means that
> "S (or 'a S' if S is a type) may have for L D (or 'a D' if D is a type)";
> "may have" corresponds to the relation cardinality [0..*]; for example
> in FT: "wn#bird p #wing" means that "a wn#bird may have for pm#spatial_part
> a wn#wing", i.e. also in FT: pm#spatial_part(wn#bird [0..*],wn#wing [0..*]);
>Of course, this interpretation may be incorrect or imprecise (here, I'd
>have prefered: pm#spatial_part(pm#healthy_bird [1],wn#wing [2]);). Then,
>when incorrect links are found, they should be corrected.
>
>I am not sure that these are the "upper level commitments" that John Bateman
>was asking for. However, when I subtype a well-defined category (say, from
>DOLCE or SUMO) by another category (say from WordNet) the associated axioms
>are inherited, hence you have more precisions about what the specialized
>category means. On the other hand, this does impose some added semantics to
>the fuzzy semantics of WordNet categories (something which may be regrettable
>but is necessary for re-using them for knowledge representation purposes).
>Unless (or until) there is a detected inconsistency (detected automatically
>or by people) between the inherited axioms, my position is to assume that
>things are fine (and for most inference engines, they will certainly be).
>
>Now, as John Sowa and my article hinted, I'd be pleased to have a more
>structured source for a (much needed for my goals) "large lexical ontology"
>than WordNet. But WordNet (and, a fortiori, my re-use of WordNet) is an
>ontology (plus a thesaurus), not just a lexicon.
>
>
>
> > But it also now gives at least 3 restructured top-levels for WordNet:
> > * EuroWordNet * Ontocleaned * MSO ...
> > And, my question to all, has anyone yet done a detailed comparison of
> > these alternatives?
>
>My article also discusses about the connections between DOLCE (Ontoclean's
>top-level ontology) and WordNet.
>I have looked at EuroWordNet but had not the time to do anything about it.
>
>
>
> > As an example, take the inference path that is possible from the SUMO
> > term Motion to the WordNet synset "motion, movement, move" then up the
> > hypernym links to "change", "action" and then "act, human action, human
> > activity". Through that faulty inference chain, one could conclude that
> > any Motion is an intentional human action, which of course is false.
>
>There is indeed a faulty link somewhere but WordNet is not necessarily to
>blame: since the WordNet motion category you refer to (which is refered to
>by #human_motion (or wn#human_motion) in the MSO of WebKB-2 and which has
>for gloss "the act of changing your location ...") is a subtype of
>wn#human_action, it can be argued that it does refer to a human movement
>(even if such a name does not appear in the synset) and hence sumo#motion
>should not have been set as a subtype of #movement but another category
>should have been chosen, e.g. #movement (which is the choice I made when
>integrating the NSM).
>Here are extracts of the FT descriptions of #movement and #human_motion
>(checkable via http://www.webkb.org/interface/categSearch.html).
>Please note that I (pm) have set a subtype link between them.
>
>#movement__motion (^a natural event that involves a change in the position
> or location of something^)
> > #approach.movement #passing.movement #deflection.movement ...
> #motion #movement.change (pm) #human_motion (pm),
> = nsm#move (pm),
> < #happening__occurrence__natural_event;
>
>#human_motion__motion__movement__move (^the act of changing your ...)
> > #approach #forward_motion #locomotion #lunge #travel ...,
> < #change #movement;
>
>The "SUMO Search tool" at
>http://ontology.teknowledge.com/cgi-bin/SUMO-browser-verbs.pl?term=motion&POS=1
>gives 5 WordNet "equivalents" to sumo#motion (&%Motion), in fact all
>the WordNet synsets that include the word "motion": these are indeed
>lexical links and not semantic links like those I propose.
>Furthermore, these lexical links are between SUMO and WordNet 1.6 so
>they will have to be checked and may be updated one day (the current
>version of WordNet is WordNet 2.0).
>
>
> > If the MSO lacks information from the ontologies it uses as sources,
> > and adds no new information
>
>As noted in my previous e-mail, you loose nothing if not all the
>definitions of the ontological primitives are included (since you can
>retrieve them anyway), and the MSO does add a lot, e.g. my top-level
>and my taxonomy of primitive relation types which are vital for my work
>(natural language representation) whereas, for that goal, I have no
>direct use for the SUMO.
>
>
>Philippe