Re: Interoperability and Vagueness
On Friday 14 January 2005 15:59, John F. Sowa wrote:
> 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).
Yes, and they may still be doing good work, but I believe AK has now left ITRI
and has set up his own company teaching people how to build dictionaries.
> 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.
Oops, I misparsed the quote. I thought it was a nice encapsulation of your
earlier paragraph proposing a "lattice of theories".
I'm sympathetic to such a "lattice of theories", as I am to your earlier
advocacy of a focus on "learning processes" (8/1/05). Both suggest to me a
focus on meaning as a process (or a perspective), which I think is of central
importance.
> 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.
A comment on the hierarchical aspect (perhaps only Cruse and not you?): I
think it is a feature of different senses that they not only supplement each
other, but that they can also contradict each other. In short, I don't think
you can compartmentalize microsenses. Each microtheory must also be able to
change the macrotheory, which makes it more difficult to implement than
"hierarchy" would imply.
> 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.
Fair enough, and as I say I am sympathetic to the approach as one which
recognizes that variable senses are central. But as stated such a model for
meaning appears very complex. Can we not find a system which has these
properties, without having this complexity?
I think you find these properties when you look for (learn) structure in
language (using distributional analysis), including the contradictory
element.
Back to me hammering on about syntax again, I'm afraid :-)
-Rob