[Corpora-List] Semantic primitives

[Ken Litkowski]

In a recent posting 
<http://mailman.uib.no/public/corpora/2011-January/012085.html>, John 
Sowa criticized so-called primitives as being the results of analysis by 
adults writing dissertations and expressed the belief that there are no 
primitives that are truly primitive. I would agree with John to the 
extent such work may be /a priori/. However, I am concerned that his 
statements may have a discouraging effect on research into primitives, 
particularly given his well-deserved reputation. Similar statements by 
Veronis and Ide in 1991 had such an effect on research with 
"machine-readable dictionaries" (all the rage during the late 1970s and 
1980s).

I have spent 40 years with my digraph analysis of dictionary 
definitions, most notably in early 2002 helping Oxford identify 
hypernyms (superordinates) for a noun hierarchy derived from the /Oxford 
Dictionary of Engliah/. This work has been of some use in Oxford's 
latest roll-out <http://oxforddictionaries.com/>. My techniques have 
proved useful in analyzing prepositions 
<http://www.clres.com/online-papers/PrepositionClasses.pdf> and FrameNet 
frame elements <http://www.clres.com/db/feindex.html> (which was aided 
by the Oxford noun hierarchy). I view this work as being very /a 
posteriori/. Robert Amsler recently expressed his enthusiasm for Google 
n-grams as being useful identifying component elements of noun 
compounds, likening this to analyzing chemical compounds into their 
component elements and binding properties. Thus, I hope we don't take 
John's words to stifle the hunt for semantic primitives (look at the 
billions in the hunt for the Higgs boson).

I have an expanded version of this note at my blog 
<http://www.clres.com/blog/?p=172>, where I provide further links to 
salient materials.

     Ken

-- 
Ken Litkowski                     TEL.: 301-482-0237
CL Research                       EMAIL: ken at clres.com
9208 Gue Road                     Home Page: http://www.clres.com
Damascus, MD 20872-1025 USA       Blog: http://www.clres.com/blog

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