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Re: [ontolog-forum] XML tags as natural language words

To: "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2008 17:58:02 -0500
Message-id: <49443DFA.7000802@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Ravi,    (01)

Those are in the same category as other natural language resources:    (02)

RS> Where would we put Vocabulary and Thesaurus efforts, would they
 > help in better tagging XML or better NL definitions helping efforts
 > in ontologies, or both?    (03)

There are several problems with tags that come from any resource
defined in any NL (e.g., terminologies, vocabularies, etc.):    (04)

  1. The tags (or words) are defined by NL statements, not by axioms
     in some version of logic.    (05)

  2. Almost all the people who annotate texts using those resources
     think in terms of some NL definition.  (This point is true
     even if the terms are defined in logic, but the annotators
     don't understand all the implications of the formal logic.)    (06)

  3. Annotators who are not trained lexicographers tend to get
     error rates of about 22% to 33%.    (07)

  4. Even professional lexicographers have inter-coder disagreements
     of about 4.5%.    (08)

And as Yorick W. and others have pointed out, even if the tags
are defined by formal axioms in some sort of logic, the definitions
tend to vary over time as the axioms change.  Yorick mentioned Cyc
as an example, for which the definitions of the formally defined
categories have changed over the past 24 years.  Therefore, those
categories are no more precise than typical NL word senses.    (09)

John    (010)



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