WordNet

[Chaumont Devin]

"RMC" <rcena at epcor-group.com> writes:

>Thank you for your reply. I'm looking at George Miller's English WordNet
as
>a model, hoping to hook up to the English WordNet a Tagalog WordNet
(check
>out the English WordNet at http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/).

Yes, I have had a copy of this for some years.

>Using
>Miller's approach, the EuroWordNet Consortium developed not only
>intralingual wordnets for a number of European languages but also
provided
>interlingual links (http://www.hum.uva.nl/~ewn/).

I was not aware of this.

>So perhaps -- dreaming
>on -- one can *think* about an interlingual Philippine WordNet, who
knows.

This would probably be easier than you imagine, depending upon how the
problem is approached.

>Right now I am stymied by the problem posed by root words. The English
>WordNet ignores the relationship between the noun house and the verb
house.

Right, and it is unable to forge links for this relationship because it is
limited to a few semantic relation types (hypernymy, holonymy, synonymy,
and antonymy, and perhaps one or two others).

Here are the fundamental flaws of WordNet:

1. Separation of various parts of speech into different files instead of
recognizing a semantic plane in which all semantic nodes reside.

2. No way to tailor part-of-speech to the requirements of other languages.

3. No way to add new parts of speech or semantic link types.

4. Very slow.

Plus a few others, some too lengthy to describe here and some I have
probably even forgotten.

And yet semantic linkages can be tricky.  You mention verb house and noun
house, and how these two are linked.  In order to get good results, people
who thoroughly understand how such things work are required in order to
ensure that they get entered correctly.  For example, my experience has
taught me that nouns and non-nouns link to different semantic nodes.  Thus
"house" as a noun does NOT link directly to the same semantic node as
"house" as a verb.  But internally the two semantic nodes do link in the
following manner: The noun, "house" is employed in the action of the verb,
to "house".  Enough said.  I will spare you further details here.

>The EuroWordNet attempted to unify nouns and verbs, by introducing new
>relations noun-to-verb hyperonym/hyponym, v-to-n hyper/hypo, etc.

A lot of hard research says that this is a mistake.  Noun nodes do occupy
the same semantic plane as verb nodes, but hypernymy NEVER exists between
them.  Non-noun hypernyms are also non-nouns, and noun hypernyms are
nouns.  I can't go into the reasons here, but if you are really
interested, I will spell it all out in a separate message.

>Add adjective and you've got more relations than you bargained for.

"Adjective" is a part of speech, and not a semantic relation.  The
important thing is that in the ontology nouns and non-nouns (verbs,
prepositions, adjectives, and adverbs) be handled separately.  The reason
for this is something I have called "state flow", which I could also
explain in a separate message.

Neither approach *derives* the noun and the verb from the *root* house.

The two "house" words do not in fact derive from the same root
semantically.  The noun is a thing having a thing and walls.  The other
encodes transition to a state (unhoused to housed), which employs the
thing as a covering.  They are linked semantically, but they do not derive
from a common semantic root.

>In a Tagalog
>Wordnet it may make more sense to treat roots as a part of speech for
this
>purpose, and to maintain a lexical relation to derived words. Wonder if
>someone in the forum has gone there, done that.

This is very interesting stuff.  Malay prefixes and suffixes are VERY
regular, and yet cannot be relied upon 100% to guarantee that the derived
word will link to the same semantic root (semantic node) as the stem word.
 A funny story about this comes out of the Moluccas.  There was this
missionary leading an evangelistic service in a church in Ternate in the
1960s.  He was leading the testimonies, and urging people to get up and
testify for Jesus Christ.  "What's the matter with you people?" he roared.
 "Do your genitals have you bound to the benches?"  The problem was that
"malu" means shy, but "kemaluan" does not mean "shyness", as would be
expected, but "genitalia"!  That missionary almost went home several times
because of difficulties like that, but the last time I heard he was still
in Indonesia, and presumably speaking the language somewhat better.

With best regards from Honolulu,
Chaumont Devin.