Re: [ontolog-forum] Guo's word senses and Foundational Ontologies

[FERENC KOVACS <f.kovacs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In my view the number of semantic primitives is necessarily very small (under ten). Semantic primitives must have been the words first used both by the human race and any child. by the very nature they were grounded in their needs to communicate intent, and to identify an object in the focus of attention in the environment, hence the meaning of such primitives must have been plural and not unambiguous. So you may say that they are faceted, and probably inarticulated in terms of parts of speech.

Verbal forms are not to be meant unchaged over time, so any attempt to fix the relation between a form (name) and the changing context is doomed to fail. You must acceptthe idea that the terminal symbols are not morphemes, syntagmas, etc. in other words syntax parsing cannot result in semantic values. Frege was wrong. Linguists who do not count with the denotative function of words and references made to reality with a purpose to act or not to act are also wrong. The bottom line is the issue of acting or not acting. The binary values of the operation  of an electronic computer. value assignment, that you limit to true or false, while information is equally important in terms of relevance, timeliness, reliability and a number of other points that all needed for a decision to act or not to act.

paradigms used by Philosophy are lovely and unfertile. paradgigms of a computer are new and productive. Why not consider revising FO terms and see that the boundaries of events are by their nature vague and not fit for purpose and will always spark debates. On the other hand the whole issue is a question of alignment of form and content where form is identical with the verbal appearance of a concept and content is whatever we individually think of it and what needs to be aligned. Making a definition by using controlled language may help the machine, but will not be any good for humans. Thinking is too fast and too rich in paths of associatiomns to be satisfied by snapshots of net shaped representations. You will have noted that is a representation of  lexical knowledge, not much to write home about on its own, becasue the it is procedural knowledge that thw world wants, the know-how, the how to information without which all ontologies are lopsided. Just think about that and rmemebr that the realtions used in formal logic and ontologies are not correct, because relations are verbs whether you believe it or not and they make your networks move about since they connect philosophy, linguistic and logic, a move that should have been made a long time ago. Just as a research into semantic equivalences within one language to se how different linguistic froms can lead to the same conclusion and inferences, etc.

Cheerio, Frank  

---

From: Jawit Kien <jawit.kien@xxxxxxxxx>
To: [ontolog-forum] <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, 29 May, 2009 5:59:22 PM
Subject: [ontolog-forum] Guo's word senses and Foundational Ontologies

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 11:51 AM, Patrick Cassidy <pat@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> In note #62, Doug Lenat and R. V. Guha made the following comments about
> the search for a set of "primitives":
> DL&RVG >> The problems... are (a) there is no small set, and (b) it's  >
> almost impossible to nail down the meaning of most interesting terms,  >
> because of the inherent ambiguity in whatever set of terms are "primitive."
>
> This remark seems to be directed at "primitive terms" used in language.  The
> kind of semantic primitives in an ontology are not ambiguous, of course, so
> Lenat here is talking about human language.  When I spoke to him last year
> about the issue of ontological primitives, he indicated to me that he
> thought there might be as many as 15,000 primitive concepts that need
> representation in an ontology, particularly because of the nuances of
> meaning in relations.  But in fact Cyc has never pursued the tactic of
> finding an inventory of conceptual primitives, so Lenat's guess is still
> only a guess.  My suggestions was that, rather than guess, we actually
> conduct a proper study to determine whether there is a finite inventory of
> conceptual primitives and if so what the number is.  In fact, even with
> respect to language he misses an important point: the senses of words that
> are "primitive" and used by, e.g. Longman in their definitions are only a
> small subset of the senses of those words.  That experiment was done by Guo
> and he concluded that the Longman grounds out on 1433 words (a subset of the
> published defining vocabulary) representing 3280 senses.  This not
> surprising to me, because the particular "language game" that is played in
> creating dictionary definitions (in Longman, at least) is to be as
> **unambiguous as possible** in a non-interactive context.  That entails the
> use of word *senses* that are common and easily recognizable in their
> context of use.  In practice, this means that the average ambiguity of the
> words used is less than 3.  John has noted that some of the definitions in
> Longman are simple and do not go into detail. Yes, but when I try to create
> more detailed definitions that include all of the necessary conditions I
> would want in an ontological specification, I find that I can accomplish
> that using the same set of words.  I think this is relevant a priori
> evidence for a finite set of semantic primitives that cannot be dismissed
> without some other experimental testing.

This experiment by Guo sounds like something I'd like to pursue in more detail.
Pat, do you have a link that gives the list of 1433 words and 3280 senses ?
I saw your power point presentation at
www.micra.com/COSMO/TheFoundationOntologyForInteroperability.ppt

which referenced
http://www.une.edu.au/bcss/linguistics/nsm/pdfs/bad-arguments5.pdf

and which did have a list of Wierczbicka’s “universal core” of sixty primitives.

As an example, I'd like to see what this last paragraph of Pat's would
look like if
expressed using solely the words in this list of word senses created
by Cheng-Ming Guo.

Pat Cassidy concluded:
> The main purpose of the FO project I have suggested is to create such a
> community of users with varied interests who can evolve an FO that suits all
> of their purposes and serves to support accurate interoperability; and to
> sustain them for several years so as to properly test that FO.  This will
> provide us with a publicly accessible FO that has actual open-source
> applications that illustrate its use, something we don't have now.


Pat, can you do that ?

JK

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