Re: [ontolog-forum] "I don't believe in word senses." Sue Atkins

[Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 12 October 2013 17:44, John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The subject line is a quotation by the professional lexicographer
Sue Atkins.  She certainly knows what she's talking about, as her
Wikipedia entry indicates:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._T._S._Atkins

Adam Kilgarriff, a computational linguist, used that quotation as
the title of a widely cited paper:

    http://www.kilgarriff.co.uk/Publications/1997-K-CHum-believe.pdf

 From the abstract of that paper:

> Word sense disambiguation assumes word senses. Within the lexicography
> and linguistics literature, they are known to be very slippery entities.
> The paper looks at problems with existing accounts of `word sense' and
> describes the various kinds of ways in which a word's meaning can deviate
> from its core meaning. An analysis is presented in which word senses
> are abstractions from clusters of corpus citations, in accordance with
> current lexicographic practice. The corpus citations, not the word senses,
> are the basic objects in the ontology. The corpus citations will be
> clustered into senses according to the purposes of whoever or whatever
> does the clustering. In the absence of such purposes, word senses do not exist.

I strongly agree with both Sue A. and Adam K. on those issues.  I won't
say that I completely agree with either or both on everything, but the
points they make are always well informed and well worth considering.
Following are Adam's publications:

    http://trac.sketchengine.co.uk/wiki/AK/Papers

Annotations can be useful for many applications.  But in general, they
must always be considered approximations for some specific purpose in
the context for which they were developed.  This fact has been very
well known to translators for centuries.

Hope this is not off topic but I happened to be reading this when this mail came into my inbox:

[[
And perhaps it is madness to grind up words in order to extract
their substance, or to graft one onto another, to create cross­
breeds and unknown variants, to open up unsuspected possibil­
ities for these words, to marry sounds which were not usually
joined before, although they were meant for one another, to allow
water to speak like water, birds to chirp in the words of birds, to
liberate all sounds of rustling, breaking, arguing, shouting, crack­
ing, whistling, creaking, gurgling - from their servile, contempt­
ible role and to attach them to the feelers of expressions which
grope for definitions of the undefined.
]]

--James Joyce

 

John

PS:  Beryl Atkins adopted the name Sue because her husband couldn't
pronounce 'Beryl'.

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