I came across a TED talk "Birth of a Word" in
which Deb X has cameras mounted all over his home.
He (and MIT Media Lab) watches his son learn to
talk, and they have developed interesting and
novel ways to track the social interactions
leading to word development in the son. It
provides some very interesting views of
communication in situ, for the home, then for
media broadcasts, then for social media
reflections of broadcast events such as the state
of the union talk. I highly recommend ontologists
watch this talk because it can give us new
thoughts about how to represent knowledge and
relate that knowledge to vocabulary: (01)
http://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_wo
rd.html (02)
-Rich (03)
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2 (04)
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of doug foxvog
Sent: Thursday, April 04, 2013 9:40 AM
To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Compound nouns (05)
On Wed, April 3, 2013 15:22, Rich Cooper wrote:
> Claiming to divide language into "NL" and
> "ontological" parts doesn't make it so. (06)
Correct. NLP and computer ontology are two fields
that inform each other. (07)
Much of what is done in NLP (statistical work,
stemming, ...) does not
involve ontologies (but just like anything else,
can be ontologized). (08)
Much of what is done in ontologies has nothing to
do with natural language
(but just like anything else, can be described in
NL). (09)
What i have been pushing for is that we
distinguish when we are referring
to ontological concepts and when we are referring
to NL concepts. A term
in an NL is expected to be fuzzy. A term in a
formal ontology should be
expected to be far less fuzzy. (010)
Yes, users often have problems with non-linguistic
labels for terms and
just guess from a name associated with the term,
ignoring longer
descriptions and associated statements. (011)
For example, the Cell Ontology in OBO used to have
the term CL_0000522,
with the name "spore" and a longer description:
"The reproductive
structure of bacteria, fungi and cryptograms.".
However, assertions
were added to the ontology that made it a
specialization of plant cell,
fungal cell, and prokaryotic cell. (012)
Similarly, CL_0000066, "epithelial cell", was
originally defined to
include both animal and plant epithelial cells as
sub-types, but
an assertion was added making it a subtype of
animal cell. (013)
-- doug foxvog (014)
> From the
> reference you gave at:
>
http://books.google.com/books/about/Ordered_Chaos.
> html?id=veBBTN6PwU4C (015)
> Continuing her discussion, the author goes on: (016)
> We have discussed earlier the possibility of
> naming ontological nodes as non linguistic
labels,
> perhaps like X3-05023-C which makes it clear
that
> there is NO linguistic relationship between
> ontological nodes and words. But that has been
an
> unworkable approach as well. The authors of the
> nodes assign "meaningful" names, such as
"river",
> and do not exhaustively characterize the node
> "river" to include all the varieties of river
> which we have discussed in the past. (017)
> The point is that mnemonic names for ontological
> nodes must necessarily be misleading at some
point
> in using the ontology. Blaming "erroneous
> interpretations" on the NL side in order to
leave
> the ontological side blameless is just an
exercise
> in self delusion. (018)
> IMHO, there is no "erroneous interpretation",
> there are only diverse interpretations. There
is
> no way to define universally what
interpretations
> are "right" and which are "wrong" because not
> everybody agrees with any ontology any more than
> they agree with a given NL processing method. (019)
> The solution to this conundrum has yet to be
> found, and indeed may not even exist.
>
> -Rich
>
> Sincerely,
> Rich Cooper
> EnglishLogicKernel.com
> Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
> 9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On
> Behalf Of doug foxvog
> Sent: Wednesday, April 03, 2013 11:43 AM
> To: [ontolog-forum]
> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Compound nouns
>
> On Tue, April 2, 2013 18:23, Simon Spero wrote:
>> On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 2:11 PM, Barkmeyer,
> Edward J <
>> edward.barkmeyer@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>>> There is nothing inaccurate about having the
> term "pineapple tree" in
>>> your ontology.
>
> The terms in an ontology are not the NL terms.
> They (should) have
> mappings to NL terms -- a big difference. Thus,
> there is nothing wrong
> in having the NL term "pineapple tree" map to a
> term (or several terms)
> in your ontology.
>
> The term in the ontology might mean a type of
> supermarket fruit display,
> a depiction of a tree carved out of a pineapple,
> or a wedding table
> decoration
>
(http://pinterest.com/emeritussl/how-to-make-a-pin
> eapple-tree/
>
http://marietta-georgia.olx.com/pictures/pineapple
>
-palm-tree-tropical-fruit-display-kit-iid-10270713
> 3
> ).
>
> The definitions and assertions about the term in
> the ontology should be
> checked for someone looking at the ontology to
> determine the meaning.
>
>>> The inaccuracy would be in saying that it is a
> subtype of
>>> "tree", assuming that we all agree on the
> definition of "tree". The
>>> assumption that the word "tree" appearing in
> the term "pineapple tree"
>>> implies some well-defined relationship is
> unwarranted. This is the kind
>>> of thing that comes from trying to guess what
> is meant by looking at
>>> natural language cues. Sometimes you guess
> wrong!
>
>> The meaning of the phrase *pineapple tree* is
> endocentric - that is to
>> say, the meaning of the whole is derived from
> its constituent parts.
>
> Here we move away from ontology to NL.
>
> Of course, there are various NL patterns that
> could suggest what the
> term may mean, given its parts.
>
>> It is is about as close to canonical an English
> noun-noun compound as they
>> get
>> (which isn't very).
>
> Exactly.
>
>> 1. It is right headed (*tree* is the head noun,
> and *pineapple* is the
>> modifier).
>> 2. The specialization in meaning obtained via
> the modifier is the
>> prototypical specialization for other modifiers
> in the same general
>> category (an *apple tree* is a *tree* on which
> *apple*s grow; a *cherry
>> tree* is a *tree * on which *cherries *grow.
>
> I note
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawberry_tree)
> there are
> *strawberry tree*s which produce fruit, and
> strawberries are fruit.
>
> Families certainly grow. Do they grow on
*family
> tree*s?
>
>> 3. If pineapples grew on trees, they would
grow
> on pineapple trees.
>
> So ... if pine cones grew on trees they would
grow
> on pine cone trees
> (conifers include pines, but also other members
of
> the pine family
> (which includes spruce and other non-pines) and
> the cypress family
> (including redwoods). And if acorns grew on
> trees they would
> grow on acorn trees!?
>
> One must generalize from "tree" to (maybe
stemmed
> rooted plant) to
> include pineapple plants. Metaphor allows this.
>
> However, we are discussing NL techniques, not
> ontological techniques
> here.
>
>> There is considerable difference between
> *pineapple tree* and *syntax tree
>> *;
>> one would not expect to be able to build a
*tree
> house* in the latter, nor
>> to hang a *bird house* from its branches.
>
> One could not build a *tree house* in *pineapple
> tree* nor hang a
> *bird house* from its branches, either.
>
>> *Fake diamond *is much more complicated to
> analyze. Syntactically,
>> *diamond
>> * is still the head, but semantically, modifier
> *fake *carries with it
>> the
>> partial meaning that it is something that has a
> very strong superficial
>> resemblance to a *real diamond,* but which
lacks
> some critical property.
>> The common super-ordinate category would
> appear to be things which
>> resemble diamonds.
>>
>> More complicated still is the case of *toys. *
> A *toy dog* is a
>> *toy*shaped like a *dog*, but a *toy poodle*
is
> a dog
>> (and a *dog toy* is a *toy *for use by dogs).
>>
>> For more fun, consider *White tigers, Paper
> tigers, Paper Airplanes*,
>> and *Model
>> airplanes. *
>> *
>> *
>> For one take on just N-N compounds,
>>
>
http://books.google.com/books/about/Ordered_Chaos.
> html?id=veBBTN6PwU4C
>
>
>
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