+1 Very lucidly explained, Hans. I share
your thoughts. (01)
-Rich (02)
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2 (03)
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Hans Polzer
Sent: Tuesday, December 10, 2013 2:57 PM
To: '[ontolog-forum] '
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] LInked Data meme
revisited (04)
John, (05)
Your points are further underscored by the issue
of context in which the
words are uttered or published. Much (most?)
dialog takes place in
institutional and domain relationship contexts
(such as this forum and in
the workplace context most of us have spent a
major portion of our lives
in). While the changes in definition of common
words are often minor or even
negligible/inconsequential in most such contexts,
a significant portion of
the words have very specific and variant
definitions in such contexts. Some
of the recent email dialog in this forum provides
many examples of this, and
the business world is filled with domain/trade and
company-specific
terminology and word senses. Also, while many aim
to publish to a broad (but
nonetheless constrained) audience and strive to
use "standard" or common
word senses, much dialog is aimed at specific
purposes by dialog
participants based on specific relationships among
those participants. And
the relationships among participants are
themselves dynamic. So we have
dynamism in the evolution of language and word
senses, we have broad
variability in contexts in which the words are
used, and we have dynamism in
the relationships of the dialog participants to
each other. (06)
Of course, this is all very frustrating to people
who want universal
interoperability and understandability - that
"universal business language
translator" mentioned somewhat tongue-in-cheek(ly)
in a classic commercial
(I believe it was for IBM, if I remember
correctly). In theory, we should
all explicitly enumerate all the context, purpose,
effective duration, and
frames of reference parameters (among others) that
might pertain to the
definitions we use in some given string of words
we utter or publish.
Pragmatically, we do it only rarely and only in
specific contexts in which
we are aware of, or are alerted to, the importance
of doing so. Even then,
we typically only enumerate what we view as the
most important context
parameters (sometimes only one). Indeed, we often
react indignantly when
someone else points out that we left out some
context condition/caveat -
"well of course, that's what I meant", or
"everyone knows that", or "I'm not
trying to boil the ocean", or "nitpicker". (07)
A key function of "session establishment" actions,
such as user logon or
"account" creations is to manage dynamism in
context and relationships. This
allows some level of consistency and precision in
word definitions and data
element definitions in computer-mediated
interactions/transactions within
the scope limits of the session or
institutional/domain relationships of the
participants (the dreaded data silos mentioned in
past dialogs on this
forum). Rather than continue to strive to do away
with such relationship
management mechanisms via universal
("context-free", "relationship-free")
linked data, it would be better, in my view, to
add mechanisms for
representing context and relationship information
on a "drill-down" basis.
By this I mean to continue to allow context
information to be ignored, if
dialog participants or information seekers choose
to do so, but to make such
information available "on demand" if participants
sense that there may be
some mismatch in word/data definitions. One way to
do this is to provide
"meta" links with any data links that point to
context/relationship
parameters that drove the particular reason for
the link being provided.
These parameters could include a few common
context parameters, such as
institution name and linker's purpose for the
link, but also should be
open-ended to allow the kind of dynamism discussed
above and in your email.
Meta-links would be optional for pragmatic reasons
and used only when the
author/creator of the link senses that there may
be followers of the link
who should be aware of link context information,
but might not be. I
realize this is a bit of hand-waving on my part,
but I believe many existing
domain-specific communication protocols and data
models already incorporate
some of these conceptual elements. Let's promote
commonality and
standardization in definitions in contexts of
defined scope and purpose,
but support dynamism, diversity and evolution in
definitions with changing
contexts, relationships and scope. (08)
Hans (09)
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of John F Sowa
Sent: Tuesday, December 10, 2013 4:36 PM
To: '[ontolog-forum] '
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] LInked Data meme
revisited (010)
Kingsley and Rich, (011)
The idea of using precise symbols and terminology
in science and in
programming languages is useful -- but only for a
very narrow application.
The reason why natural languages are so flexible
is that a finite vocabulary
can be adapted to an infinite range of
applications. That implies that it's
impossible (and undesirable) to force words to be
used with fixed and frozen
definitions. (012)
RC
> I don't think it will be feasible in the next
decade to find a
> universal dictionary. (013)
I would revise that point in the following way: (014)
It will *never* be possible or desirable to
have a fixed dictionary
of precisely defined word senses for any
natural language. The
French organized l'Académie française to stop
their language from
evolving. The net result is that the French
adopt their new words
from the most rapidly evolving of all
languages: English. (015)
Following is a copy of a note I sent to Ontolog
Forum in October.
I strongly recommend Adam K's article. The title
is taken from a comment by
Sue Atkins, a professional lexicographer who
devoted her entire career to
defining words and collaborating with linguists,
computational linguists,
and computer scientists. (016)
Many people wish that precise URIs would solve the
ambiguity problem.
They could get much better odds by wishing to win
the Powerball lottery. (017)
John (018)
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: "I don't believe in word senses." Sue
Atkins
Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2013 11:44:01 -0400
From: John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: '[ontolog-forum] '
<ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> (019)
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: (020)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._T._S._Atkins (021)
Adam Kilgarriff, a computational linguist, used
that quotation as the title
of a widely cited paper: (022)
http://www.kilgarriff.co.uk/Publications/1997-K-CH
um-believe.pdf (023)
From the abstract of that paper: (024)
> 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. (025)
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: (026)
http://trac.sketchengine.co.uk/wiki/AK/Papers (027)
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. (028)
John (029)
PS: Beryl Atkins adopted the name Sue because her
husband couldn't
pronounce 'Beryl'. (030)
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