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

Re: SUO: Universal Time, other universals, and cultural contextof SUO.


>Pat,
>
>You keep citing them all the time.  For granularity, you cited
>Jerry Hobbs.

Jerry might be one example, though even there I think the linguistic 
pressure, as it were, has warped his ontological perspective into 
something virtually useless in practice. I cite the 'promiscuous 
ontology' usually as a kind of existence proof rather than an 
exemplar.

>WordNet is perhaps the most widely used collection
>of categories, and it was done by a psychologist, George Miller,
>who has been hanging out with linguists for the past 40+ years.

I greatly respect Miller and I am sure that WordNet is a valuable 
resource for someone, but it is utterly and entirely useless for 
anything to do with ontology. (Do you recall the discussions at 
Heidelberg with Piek about EuroNet, and how  useless they were? None 
of the linguistically inspired categories make ontological sense.)

>And there are quite a few logicians who hang out with computational
>linguists, especially when working on theories of modality,
>tense logics, etc.

Right. If one is interested in the logical structure of NL - and I 
have every respect for those who are, let me say, I find it 
fascinating myself - then this is the thing to do. But that is one 
game, and ontology/KR is another game.

> > Adam, can you cite any? I havn't come across many such insights from
> > computational linguistics in KR.
>
>Following is a book review I wrote (which is scheduled for the
>March 2001 issue of _Computational Linguistics_) of a book by
>a linguist, M. A. K. Halliday, who has a lot of interesting ideas
>related to topics in ontology.  (I had to make some minor adjustments
>to let it slip through your filter.)

Thanks for the review (and the adjustments), but it seems to me to 
confirm my point rather than be opposed to it. Every topic you 
mention the book as being about is concerned directly with language 
structure. Of course if you focus on NL then linguistic data is 
relevant: so what?

Pat Hayes

---------------------------------------------------------------------
IHMC					(850)434 8903   home
40 South Alcaniz St.			(850)202 4416   office
Pensacola,  FL 32501			(850)202 4440   fax
phayes@ai.uwf.edu 
http://www.coginst.uwf.edu/~phayes