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Tom,
(comments embedded)
On 5/2/2014 10:52 AM, tknorr wrote:
Good morning,
I was wondering if this is a relatively stable number of concepts that
should be in any ontology/repository: the concepts of the English
language that cannot be described through a semantic sub-net.
It seems to me that we should be able to develop that number, if it
doesn't already exist somewhere.
The Oxford English Dictionary group (OED) has
announced that their next version, OED3, will be available "real
soon now" with a date of 2034. The estimate is that it will
contain around 800,000 entries. And it would come in at around 40
volumes. There is doubt that it will ever be printed.
http://www.mhpbooks.com/third-edition-of-the-oed-to-be-completed-in-2034/
It is bound to be full of concepts. However,
as far as concepts go; first it is hard to define a concept. I can
give you several definitions off the top of my head and I'm sure
others here could do likewise with some overlap.
There is a school of thought from Brodmann's
work in physiology. It concerns the presence of neural columns
along the cortex. These come in two versions; micro-columns and
mini-columns. There are about 100 neurons in a micro-column and
about 100 micro-columns in a mini-column. Columns are found
throughout the nervous system including along the retina. Further,
it is discussed that around 40% of the neurons in the cortex are
actually neuronal couplets consisting of two neurons, bonded at
several points in opposite directions. (One appears to be a control
mechanism on the primary "voting" neuron.) The reference below
concerns columns in monkeys and their brains are similar to humans
with differences of a few Brodmann areas.
http://www.physics.drexel.edu/~ccruz/publications/2005_Cruz_JNM_Monkeys.pdf
The general consensus in The Brain (the
journal) community is that columns serve as points that function
to draw together data from a larger area around the column which
might be interpreted as a concept (personal communication, John
Nolte, "The Human Brain").
If you use Brodmann's measurements of the distance between columns
you can "back-into" a figure of around 50,000 columns on the
cortex. Certainly some of these are involved in basic
communications. An key issue with communications is that
responsive neuronal firings (called reciprocal firings) reinforce
signaling of "interesting" information. Neurons are
unidirectional. To establish a bi-directional channel between
regions of the brain, there must be some neurons that associate
sets of neurons in pairs to handle both directions.
This has been seen between the visual areas and the cortex. In
effect, the cortex gets information from the visual center that is
meaningful; as in "oh, that's a square, send me the same signal
each time you see this shape." This way the visual center doesn't
need to know what it means, just what its spatial information is.
The signal is in a pattern of neurons firing that are impressed in
a similar manner on the cortex. That pattern of multiple neurons
represent a concept that the cortex finds interesting.
The difficulty with all of this is that neurons themselves reduce
information sometimes 1000-3000 :1, so "it's turtles all the way
down". Ultimately, everything in a natural language is a concept
and each depends on large amounts of memory to shape speech
concerning a linguistic concept. To
answer your question it is my opinion that it is more fruitful to
focus on the task at hand and develop a technical vocabulary for
the task that extends the core vocabulary. If you are not familiar
with Ogden's work in Basic English core vocabulary that would be a
good place to start. There are a number of others also, including
Simple English and Simplified English. These have been useful for
machine translation between NATO languages.
-John Bottoms
FirstStar Systems
Concord, MA USA
Anyone have some pointers?
Tom
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