On Wed, November 28, 2012 10:27, Hassan Aït-Kaci wrote:
> Hello, (01)
> All this discussion on meaningful vs. meaningless labels in an
> ontologies brought back to me the memory of a paper I wrote back in 1982
> [!] while a grad student at Penn describing an experiment on what sense
> a human user is able to make out of an ontology using English labels as
> opposed to to dummy labels. (02)
In your experiment, no descriptions of the terms and relations
were given to the users. The only things that identified meaning
were the labels. (03)
> What I used then to represent the ontology was Ron Brachman's KL-One
> and the domain was the description of a Production-Distribution-Inventory
> optimization system. (04)
This was only the domain of the labeled ontology. The unlabeled ontology
had no domain, since there was nothing to indicate the meaning of
any of the terms (other than that they were relations or classes). (05)
> Subjects (all unfamiliar with the domain) were asked to answer
> questions regarding the ontology (half of the experiment subjects
> were presented with meaningfully named nodes, and half with
> dummy-labeled nodes). (06)
> The conclusion of the experiment was, to quote part of my paper's
> conclusion, that "when entities bear English names, natural language
> productions are more compact, more "natural", and syntactically more
> elegant." Descriptions given by the subjects seeing only dummy-labels
> were verbose, and tended to carry no clear meaning, even with a clearly
> detailed ontological structure. (07)
Of course, there was no meaning, much less a clear meaning with the
dummy label system. In the example, the users conjugated and used
plurals for the natural names, referring to the topics of the ontology,
not to its terms. They did not treat the alphanumeric names of the
dummy labels is this way, which made their explanations less compact. (08)
It's an interesting study, but we were comparing ontology terms that had
meaning described by gloss and mappings to NL terms, but non-NL
IDs from those that also had NL IDs. So, i'm not sure that it has that
much bearing on this discussion. (09)
> Here's the paper:
>
>http://www.hassan-ait-kaci.net/pdf/Describing-Knowledge-from-Semantic-Networks.pdf (010)
-- doug f (011)
> Cheers,
>
> -hak
> --
> http://www.hassan-ait-kaci.net/contactme.html (012)
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