Spot-on and very nicely stated, Hans. (01)
I would also reference Pat Hayes' post to the Ontolog forum of 1/2/2008
9:07 PM
(http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/2008-01/msg00035.html), in
which he states: (02)
"... there is no such 'thing' as an objective context, and so there is
no general theory of contexts, or science of contexts, which can be
applied to all cases of "context". Indeed, since, in the limit, it seems
that almost anything can influence meaning under some circumstances, it
follows that anything at all can be considered to be a context." (03)
I might rewrite part of that to say, "almost anything *will* [subtly or
grossly] influence meaning in *every* circumstance." For this reason, it
is difficult to deconstruct the meaning of any particular
natural-language utterance to find the meaning behind it. (04)
But, however, nevertheless -- also keeping in mind that no one here
believes that we can represent human knowledge perfectly -- it is still
possible to create formal representations of exchanges of meaning.
Humans can internalize the meaning of those representations with
sufficient accuracy to make judgments about their relevance and usefulness. (05)
It is highly desirable to do so -- proactively, as those communications
take place -- because static "information" is no longer our friend. The
meaning of those communications is negotiated. Without explicit
representations of meaning, individuals even slightly removed from
localized discussions will fail to understand or will misinterpret
natural-language information. Even the participants in those
discussions will have different interpretations of that information.
(Reactions to meeting notes usually confirm those differences!) (06)
The cost of reverse-engineering the meaning of such communications
recorded solely as natural-language information is extraordinarily high:
wasted time, duplication of effort, introduction of errors ... and
opportunities missed. (07)
Phil Murray (08)
Hans Polzer wrote:
> John,
>
> 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.
>
> 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".
>
> 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.
>
> Hans
>
> -----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
>
> Kingsley and Rich,
>
> 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.
>
> RC
>> I don't think it will be feasible in the next decade to find a
>> universal dictionary.
> I would revise that point in the following way:
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Many people wish that precise URIs would solve the ambiguity problem.
> They could get much better odds by wishing to win the Powerball lottery.
>
> John
>
> -------- 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>
>
> 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'.
>
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> (09)
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