Javit Klein wrote:
>> On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 1:12 PM, Patrick Cassidy
<pat@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Other possible
sources of essential primitives could be the 3000 most frequent Chinese
characters (covering 98.9% of modern text) and the 2000 most common signs of
AMESLAN. But these symbols have not been tested as a "defining
vocabulary".
[JK] > According to:
http://chinesewords.blogspot.com/2005/11/most-frequent-chinese-characters.html
> just because you can recognise the characters, doesn't mean you know what
they mean.
Apparently Chinese characters, much like other words in a natural language,
depend
on the way they are used to disambiguate their meaning.
>
> Perhaps we should be discussing that issue:
>
> ie: what methods exist to disambiguate the meaning of a word or phrase, so
that it can be precisely (enough for a purpose) axiomatised?
Yes, the individual characters in Chinese do have
multiple possible meanings, just as English words do, but many have a core
meaning, just as English words do. And the words composed of more than
one character occasionally have little perceptible relation to the meanings
of the individual characters, but that is atypical. Words in
Chinese need to be mapped to the precise meanings of an ontology, just as the words
in any other language. The mappings will depend on the needs of the
community using the ontology, but the FO principle is that many communities can
use the same FO, though they may map the same word to different ontology
elements.
What the Longman, Chinese characters, and AMESLAN
have in common is the exemplification of the principle that, when there is a
premium on finding as small a set as possible of symbols for communication, a
few thousand seem to suffice as a base for combinatorial construction of many
more words. Because of ambiguity and shift of meaning with context, there
may be somewhat more than 3000 precisely defined ontology elements needed to
achieve the same coverage in a computer ontology. But the number needed
for computers can only be determined by a careful study, which is a part of the
purpose of the FO project.
Pat
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA, Inc.
908-561-3416
cell: 908-565-4053
cassidy@xxxxxxxxx
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Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Foundation ontology, CYC, and Mapping