Re: Interoperability and Vagueness
Rob,
Thanks for the reference to that paper by
Adam Kilgarriff. There's also a lot of other
interesting work on computational linguistics,
lexicography, and related work at ITRI at the
University of Brighton. (See note below).
Some further comments:
Alan Cruse>> I am similarly pessimistic about the
>> possibility of representing meaning by prototypes:
>> what would seem to be called for is an indefinitely
>> large set of prototypes-within-prototypes."
RF> What would prototypes-within-prototypes look like?
You would have to ask Cruse. My guess is that you
can't just have one prototype for "dog", but a large
collection of prototypes for beagle, dachshund, collie,
mutt, etc. Then you would also need prototypes for
parts of dogs, such as a typical dog nose, tail, ears,
paws, etc., with special cases for each type of dog.
You would have to do something similar for every kind
of animal, car, truck, operating system, legal system,
country, province, state, city, town, village, etc.
There are two approaches to word senses that I like
very much. They start from different points of view,
but they reach similar conclusions:
1. Monosemy. That's the idea that each word has
a single core meaning, and in different contexts,
it can diverge from the core in several ways:
metaphor, metonymy, and specialization.
2. Microsenses. Each word has an open-ended number
of meanings that differ from one another by small
degrees from one context to another. Each use
could be distinguished as a different microsense.
Philosophically, I relate microsenses to Wittgenstein's
notion of language games, in which the meaning of each
word changes with the game (or context) in which it
is used. For a formal ontology, I would handle these
approaches in terms of the lattice of theories:
1. Assign the common core to a very general concept
type (or predicate) in the ontology.
2. Treat the metaphors and metonyms as systematic
methods for generating new types in the hierarchy,
which may or may not be subtypes of the common core.
3. Treat the specializations as a systematic way of
generating new microsenses for each language game.
4. Formalize each game in terms of a theory within
the lattice.
I do not claim that the lattice of theories corresponds
to the way that people normally understand language. But
what I do claim is that it provides a systematic way of
formalizing and representing any particular use that anyone
might want to relate to some formalized computer application.
However, I also believe that most use of language is never
going to be formalized, and there is no reason why it should.
But if, for some purpose, you want to do so, here's how.
John Sowa
____________________________________________________________
Information Technology Research Institute
The Information Technology Research Institute (ITRI) is a dedicated
research department within the University of Brighton. The current focus
of the Institute's work is on computational linguistics, language
engineering, and human computer interfaces. Our research addresses the
following theoretical issues: architectures for natural language
generation, constraint based reasoning, controlled languages, corpora,
diagrammatic reasoning, dialog, discourse, integrating text and
graphics, lexical knowledge bases, lexical representation, message
understanding, multilinguality, natural language interfaces, text
generation, underspecification, word sense disambiguation. The work of
the Institute is funded primarily by grants from national and European
research councils and contracts with commercial organizations. Much of
our work is on highly theoretical issues, but the Institute is also
strongly committed to strategic research, ensuring whenever possible
that the results of our research can provide solutions to real-world
problems.
For ITRI publications see
http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/techreports/