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

[Gary Berg-Cross <gbergcross@xxxxxxxxx>]

Rich

Personal ontologies are always possible in a Lewis Carroll sense, but not the goal when one is pursuing some operative degree of interoperability.

I was asking about a start on ontology development aided by the use of extant vocabularies and definitions, not taking that definition as an end point. There is a good deal of analysis in context such as with real data and what it means to users that goes into the refinement for there.

Gary Berg-Cross, Ph.D.  

gbergcross@xxxxxxxxx     

http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?GaryBergCross

NSF INTEROP Project  

http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0955816

SOCoP Executive Secretary

Knowledge Strategies    

Potomac, MD

240-426-0770

On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 4:25 PM, Rich Cooper <rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Gary,

 

The operational question is: Whose definition will be used for which concept?

 

The consistent result on this email list has been that we (presumably with an adequate understanding of ontology principles) disagree emphatically on every ontology that has so far been discussed, with the exception of Dublin Core. 

 

It would seem to be a reasonable conclusion that ontologies are personal systems of what each individual believes exists.  That means that when you put together a lot of people who “define” an ontology, you get the usual result of a politically complicit elephant where a mouse would do well. 

 

-Rich

 

Sincerely,

Rich Cooper

EnglishLogicKernel.com

Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com

9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2

---

From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Gary Berg-Cross
Sent: Tuesday, October 15, 2013 1:16 PM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] "I don't believe in word senses." Sue Atkins

 

John

 

Still would we agree that "defitional" ideas  term/wordsenses as assembled in dictionaries. glossaries and the like are useful places

to look when trying to develop ontologies?

Gary Berg-Cross, Ph.D.  

gbergcross@xxxxxxxxx     

http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?GaryBergCross

NSF INTEROP Project  

http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0955816

SOCoP Executive Secretary

Knowledge Strategies    

Potomac, MD

240-426-0770

 

On Sat, Oct 12, 2013 at 11:44 AM, 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.

John

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

_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J

 

_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J
 

_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/  
Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/  
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/ 
To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J    (01)