Re: Interoperability and Vagueness
Very nice to see this reality check coming in, even
though it may fall on deaf ears...
Boyan:
> 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.
Our approach to ontology and language as explored with our
OntoSpace and related projects at our Collaborative Research
Center on Spatial Cognition (http://www.sfbtr8.uni-bremen.de)
takes exactly this position on the relation between language
and the world and ontologies for both. It is our position
that any other view of ontology and language may be studying useful
and interesting problems, but not how natural
language really works.
John Sowa:
> The difficulty is caused by reality itself, i.e,
> all this physical stuff we move around in and
> interact with. That is a problem for ontology
> directly and only indirectly for NLP.
>
goes back to old differences in theoretical and
philosophical approaches.
We take the fact that word (and grammatical and semantic and
textual) distinctions are *inherently* negotiatiable
precisely via "complex and dynamic mappings", as
Boyan says, as in intrinic, necessary and even
ontological feature of natural language. Without
this feature, there would not be natural language.
Period. So it is certainly much more than
"indirectly" a problem for NLP. Unless NLP is
restricted a priori to be a study of artificial
systems that are only loosely comparable with
natural language as evolved and used by humans.
We do not take this position in our own work
on NLP however.
I look forward to more interaction concerning
a nontrivialised version of the relation between
language and ontology.
John B.
--
John Bateman
FB10, Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaften
Universität Bremen
28334 Bremen, Germany.
Tel: +49/421-218-9483
Fax: +49/421-218-4283 (or 218-7801)
http://www.uni-bremen.de/~bateman