Rob,
In a study of the words used in the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary
English, Guo found that of the 2100 words used in the defining vocabulary,
with which Longman defines all the words in its dictionary, only 1400 words
representing 3200 senses were required to define (recursively) all of the
words in the dictionary. Many of those are types rather than relations, so
fewer than half of these would be a reasonable estimate for the number of
"primitive" relations in the English language. More complex relations can
be constructed as combinations of the primitives. (01)
As I have mentioned, I am working to prepare an ontology (COSMO) that
represents the words in the Longman defining vocabulary, and will test
whether the representations of those words will serve as "conceptual
primitives" in a logical format. I hope to be able to answer your question
experimentally, for a formal language that has mappings to English. This
will take over a year. (02)
Pat (03)
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA, Inc.
908-561-3416
cell: 908-565-4053
cassidy@xxxxxxxxx (04)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-
> bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Rob Freeman
> Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 5:58 PM
> To: [ontolog-forum]
> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Axiomatic ontology
>
> Chris,
>
> On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 3:17 AM, Christopher Menzel <cmenzel@xxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
> >
> > More generally, then, the answer to your question "who [better: what]
> > sez how many relations are enough to provide denotations for all the
> > relation-naming terms in the language?" is: "The language and its
> > semantics." And how many relations are needed, for a given language
> > +semantics, can be determined quite precisely.
>
> How many are needed for English?
>
> -Rob
>
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