RE: Interoperability and Vagueness

Thread Links	Date Links
Thread Prev	Thread Next	Thread Index	Date Prev	Date Next	Date Index

-----Original Message-----
From: Tim King [mailto:tmk@lsc.co.uk]
Sent: 17 January 2005 10:45
To: West, Matthew R SIPC-OFD/321; standard-upper-ontology@LISTSERV.IEEE.ORG
Subject: RE: Interoperability and Vagueness

(i) is it necessary and possible to choose suitable names that do not encourage the reader to think in terms of the words in the names and diverge from thinking about the intended concept?

MW: Well I must admit that I tend to have a preference for having the formal identifier for a concept as a number, you can then allow (you will even need) a number of names for the concept along with the group that uses that name for the concept. Even here I think care needs to be taken to sufficiently qualify the name that the concept is recognisable when the name is seen out of context, so I favour long names when terms are used.

(ii) as word meaning evolves do some of the names chosen at any point become less suitable?

MW: Yes, and you see this in dictionaries when some useages of a term are marked as no longer used (the group that used that name have all died).

-----Original Message-----
From: West, Matthew R SIPC-OFD/321 [mailto:matthew.west@SHELL.COM]
Sent: 17 January 2005 09:33
To: Boyan A. Onyshkevych; John F. Sowa
Cc: standard-upper-ontology@LISTSERV.IEEE.ORG
Subject: RE: Interoperability and Vagueness

I agree with Boyan that it is important to distinguish between
words and concepts, and also that an ontology is about concepts,
and their interelationships.

However, I also agree with John that there are an infinite number
of concepts we might be interested in because of the natural
complexity of the world.

1. It seems to me that the "names" we give concepts in an ontology
should be seen more like product codes (identifiers), than words.

2. An ontology must be extensible, because it will always be
possible to come up with new concepts.

3. Given this it is useful to standardise the identification of
concepts, because concepts don't change (only their importance
to us).

Matthew West
Reference Data Architecture and Standards Manager
Shell International Petroleum Company Limited
Shell Centre, London SE1 7NA, United Kingdom

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
> [mailto:owner-standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org]On Behalf Of Boyan A.
> Onyshkevych
> Sent: 14 January 2005 20:53
> To: John F. Sowa
> Cc: standard-upper-ontology@listserv.ieee.org; cg@cs.uah.edu
> Subject: Re: Interoperability and Vagueness
>
>
> John,
>
> Many of the points made in this exchange seem to stem from
> difficulties with an implicit assumption, namely that a word or
> a word-sense has a simple, static mapping to a concept in an
> ontology, or that an ontology is constructed from an arrangement
> of words or word-senses (Would you consider a WordNet to be
> an ontology?) Are you using concept and word-sense interchangeably?
>
> It seems that contextualization, metonymy, multiple languages in the
> world, non-compositionality, other difficulties pointed out in this
> thread, all seem to point in the direction of complex and dynamic
> mappings between words as used in a particular utterance in a
> particular
> language, and ontological concepts or an ontologically-anchored
> representation of the meaning of that utterance.
>
> While we may or may not know what such a representation should look
> like, at the limit, what are the arguments for using words or
> word-senses from that language in attempting to build such a
> representation, as some researchers do?
>
> While one can argue about vagueness in the specification
> of concepts in an ontology, word ambiguity appears to me to
> be a separate issue.
>
> -Boyan
>
> 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).
> >
> > 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/
> >
> >
>

DISCLAIMER: ***SECURITY LABEL: NOT PROTECTIVELY MARKED*** The information in this message is confidential and may be legally privileged. It is intended solely for the addressee. Access to this message by anyone else is unauthorised. If you are not the intended recipient, any disclosure, copying, or distribution of the message, or any action or omission taken by you in reliance on it, is prohibited and may be unlawful. Please immediately contact the sender if you have received this message in error. This e-mail originates from LSC Group. Registered in England & Wales No 2275471 Registered Office: Devonport Royal Dockyard, Devonport, Plymouth, PL1 4SG