[Corpora-List] WordNet vs Ontology

[Jim Fidelholtz]

Hi, All,

As a Natural Language ProcessER, with a rudimentary understanding of the
term 'ontology' (now somewhat clearer thanks to earlier comments), I would
like to comment on the original question, which seems to have come from
someone with as many problems with (understanding) the term as I have.
While there can, of course, exist ontologies of ontologies (whatever you
might want to call them), my NL understanding of the term leads me to the
conclusion that 'elements of an ontology' (or even elements of a listing,
dictionary, etc.) are not *as such* 'ontologies', although they may
independently qualify under some definitions as such.

While, as a mathematician and sometime dabbler in philosophy, I am familiar
with logical notions, as a linguist I have almost always been very
skeptical of the applications of logic to linguistic structure. Many very
brilliant people have attempted to force language into a logical mold, to
my mind with *very* limited success. We could discuss the reasons for this
relative lack of success from a linguistic point of view, but I strongly
suspect it has to do with what Gödel showed about a century ago, that *all*
systems (with the appropriate footnote here) ineluctably lead to at least
*some* (read: an infinite number of) contradictions. Well, even though I am
not very familiar with all the later literature on this question, which has
no doubt found at least some ways to limit the deleterious effects on
science of this discovery, I am still a linguist and plan to remain one
(which I consider being a scientist) and continue to try to find
demonstrable results within the structured quagmire that is language. Well,
despite my rather convoluted, probably ambiguous way of expressing myself,
you know what I mean!

Jim

James L. Fidelholtz
Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje
Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades
Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, MÉXICO


On Wed, Aug 6, 2014 at 12:57 PM, Rich Cooper <rich at englishlogickernel.com>
wrote:

> Whatever happened to VerbNet?  Are they still
> operating, and has it gotten very far with users
> yet?
>
> -Rich
>
> Sincerely,
> Rich Cooper
> EnglishLogicKernel.com
> Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
> 9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
> -----Original Message-----
> From: corpora-bounces at uib.no
> [mailto:corpora-bounces at uib.no] On Behalf Of John
> F Sowa
> Sent: Wednesday, August 06, 2014 5:37 AM
> To: corpora at uib.no
> Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] WordNet vs Ontology
>
> On 8/6/2014 5:57 AM, liling tan wrote:
> > Is wordnet an ontology? If it is not an
> ontology, what is it?
>
> WordNet is widely used as a resource for
> developing and relating
> ontologies in AI, computational linguistics, and
> the Semantic Web.
>
> But most projects in those fields distinguish
> lexical resources,
> such as WordNet, from the formal ontologies that
> are specified
> in some version of logic.
>
> > What is the definition of an ontology? Is
> anything
> > (words/concept/entities) under a hierarchical
> structure
> > some sort of linguistic ontology?
>
> In philosophy, ontology is the study of existence.
> In computational
> systems, *an* ontology is a collection of formally
> defined terms
> that characterize the entities that exist in some
> domain and the
> relationships among those entities.
>
> WordNet, Roget's Thesaurus, dictionaries,
> terminologies, and other
> lexical resources focus on words in various
> languages.  They are
> valuable as a starting point for the analysis
> required to state
> formal specifications.  But much more analysis is
> needed to refine
> those definitions for a particular theory of
> ontology.
>
> > Are linguistic ontology / information science
> ontology
> > subjected to only upper and domain ontology?
>
> There is no consensus about how linguistic
> resources can or
> should be related to formal ontologies or how
> either kind
> of resource should be structured.
>
> But it is common to have an underspecified upper
> level
> for general terms and lower-level specializations
> (AKA
> microtheories) for more specialized terms.  Some
> very large
> system, such as Cyc, have an upper-level,
> mid-level, and
> lower-level.
>
> The categories in Cyc are rarely mapped to and
> from common
> words that have a huge number of word senses.
> They are more
> likely to be mapped to word phrases or to very
> specialized
> technical words.
>
> > Any other comments about ontology and wordnet?
>
> Following are the slides of a tutorial about
> ontology, logic,
> and issues of relating them to language and
> computation:
>
> http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/kdptut.pdf
>
> John
>
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