SUO: Monosemy in a controlled language, disambiguating word senses [was:Informal definitions of ...]
Richard Cooper wrote:
> The notion of monosemy in a controlled language
> bothers me.
Please try to explain what bothers you.
What intuitions are unsatisfied with
matching one vocabulary term with one
unit of meaning?
> I'm looking for ways to disambiguate
> polysemous words, now that I have a relational
> database of WordNet synsets.
>
> One thing that suggests itself is to use
> paraphrasing of words in a synset. That led
> me to think about tools to automatically
> generate paraphrases from a corpus.
I would be interested in characterizing
the different senses of a *verb* in terms
of type constraints on "participant roles"
as evidenced in sample sentences that
exemplify that sense. I think we would
need to constrain both the thematic
roles themselves (and John S's proposal
in http://www.jfsowa.com/ontology/thematic.htm
seems an excellent starting point) and
the types of the participants. I'm not
sure how much the FrameNet work already
addresses this idea.
This would produce something like a
semantic treebank of exemplifying
phrases (perhaps based on simplified
sentences with just the head words
of the noun phrases, but adding
some implicit information about
the situation being mentioned, enough
to distinguish this word sense from
others).
For nouns, qualia like TELIC (which
constrains the meaning of nouns that
refer to artifacts in relation to some
purpose, typically characterized by
a verb that fulfills that purpose) might
provide a comparable degree of resolution.
I'm getting this from the article by
Ann Copestake (and somebody else? I
don't have the book handy) in Lexical
Semantics edited by Pustejovsky and
Briscoe (?)) I'm afraid I still don't
understand qualia in lexical semantics,
and haven't had time to study Corelex.
I think this approach can be tested
in small domains like the text of
*definitions* for small standard
vocabularies. For example, I have
been playing around with the verbs
and nouns in the definitions of the
15 terms in simple Dublin Core. This
could be helpful in ensuring that
terms introduced in qualified DC
have appropriate relationships with
the terms they are refining.
Fred