[Corpora-List] WordNet vs Ontology

[John F Sowa]

On 8/7/2014 4:16 PM, Michal Ptaszynski wrote:
>> - Lexicon (example, Machine Readable Dictionaries) - Vocabulary with
>> NL definitions
>> - Simple Taxonomy (example, Clasifications)
>> - Thesaurus (example, WordNet) Lexical relations
>> - Taxonomy plus related-terms (example, Relational Model) Light-weight
>> ontologies - Unconstrained use of arbitrary relations
>> - Fully Axiomatized Theory (Heavy-weight ontologies)
>
> This definition makes me wonder - what is NOT an ontology? If even a
> simple lexicon is also an ontology, most papers in NLP and CL
> describe research with the use of ontologies, even unintentionally.

That is an important point:  Using the word 'ontology' as a catchall
term for any kind of list makes it meaningless.

By etymology, ontology is the study of existence.  An ontology
is a classification and definition of the entities that exist
in some domain of interest -- which could be as large as the
universe or as small as a single application.

A dictionary, lexicon, thesaurus, or terminology addresses words
and how they're used.  For over two millennia, Aristotle and
everybody else distinguished words from the things they refer to.

Blurring that distinction is a bad idea.  Like Sue Atkins
and Adam Kilgarriff, I don't believe that there are clearly
distinguishable word senses that have a well-defined mapping
to things that exist -- except for very specialized technical
terms for which a particular sense has been stipulated.

See below for a pointer to  Kilgarriff's article and some
excerpts from it.

John
______________________________________________________________

Kilgarriff's article: http://arxiv.org/pdf/cmp-lg/9712006v1.pdf
Excerpts in slide 17 of http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/goal3.pdf :

       "I DON'T BELIEVE IN WORD SENSES."

The title is a quotation by the lexicographer Sue Atkins, who
devoted her career to writing and analyzing word definitions.

In an article with that title, Adam Kilgarriff observed that

  * "A task-independent set of word senses for a language is
    not a coherent concept."

 * "The basic units of meaning are not the word senses, but
    the actual occurrences of a word in context."

  * "There is no reason to expect the same set of word senses
    to be relevant for different tasks."

  * "The set of senses defined by a dictionary may or may not
    match the set that is relevant for an NLP application."

 * Professional lexicographers are well aware of these issues.

  * The senses they select for a dictionary entry are based on
    editorial policy and assumptions about the readers' expectations.

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