Dear
John,
Not
for the first time, I think the problem is in the use of
words. In this case term.
A
lexicon is a list of words and phrases for a domain. There
is no reason why there should not be more than one word or
phrase with the same meaning. The word term is sometimes
used to refer to the entries in the lexicon.
In
order to be able to identify the words or phrases (terms)
with the same meaning, they introduce the word “concept” to
be that which is what several words or phrases might all
mean, independent of those words or phrases.
In
logic, the lexicon is generally restricted so that each term
has one meaning (unless an identity relation is used). So
broadly, the use in logic of “term” corresponds to the use
that some others make of “concept”.
It
is not only the Americans and the English who are divided by
a common language.
Regards
Matthew
West
Information
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re:
Publisher's notes for book on Amazon ("Studies in Natural
Language Processing", CambridgeU)
The publisher, and maybe the author, says that the lexicon
contains concepts. I had expected to see terms and maybe
proper nouns. I don't understand how you can have a concept
in isolation in a lexicon. It seems that if it does not have
relations and constrains specified then it is not really a
concept.
And, if it is an entity that is not classified, then it
should be found in the "indeterminate" universal.
We do need some consistency in terminology and usage.
Publisher's Note
The relation between ontologies and language is currently at
the forefront of natural language processing (NLP).
Ontologies, as widely used models in semantic technologies,
have much in common with the lexicon. A lexicon organizes
words as a conventional inventory of concepts, while
an ontology formalizes concepts and their logical relations.
A shared lexicon is the prerequisite for knowledge-sharing
through language, and a shared ontology is the prerequisite
for knowledge-sharing through information technology. In
building models of language, computational linguists must be
able to accurately map the relations between words and the
concepts that they can be linked to. This book focuses on
the technology involved in enabling integration between
lexical resources and semantic technologies. It will be of
interest to researchers and graduate students in NLP,
computational linguistics, and knowledge engineering, as
well as in semantics, psycholinguistics, lexicology and
morphology/syntax.
-John Bottoms
First Star Systems
Concord, MA