[Corpora-List] WordNet vs Ontology

[Eduard Barbu]

Hi
all,
 
Let
me contribute to this discussion by making some necessary clarifications :
1.    Princeton
Wordnet is lexical database that organize nouns, verbs and adjective and
adverbs. The organization of adjectives is not based on ontological principles. The main
relation that organizes the adjectives is antonymy and antonymy is a linguistic
relation. When someone asks if the Wordnet is an ontology they only refer  to
nouns.This is the first problem.
2.     The nouns are structured by two relations in Wordnet : hyperonymy and meronymy. Both are linguistic relations. For example in the well know
paper "Introduction to Wordnet: An Online Lexical database "the authors define in this way the hyponymy relation : 
“Much
attention has been devoted to hyponymy/hypernymy (variously called subordination/superordination,
subset/superset, or the ISA relation). A concept represented by the
synset {x, x1, . . .} is said to be a hyponym of the concept
represented by the synset {y, y1, . . .} if native speakers of
English accept sentences constructed from such frames as An x is a (kind
of)”
Please notice that the definition of hyperonymy is not formal
but it is based on the judgement of native English speakers. The native English
speakers tend to accept many constructions that are not ISA relations in the
formal sense. Some of this constructions have been discussed in many papers (e.g. see papers from Nicola Giuarino's group ) .Therefore if you ask : Is the part of Wordnet that is organized
by the hyponymy relation a taxonomy? The answer is : it is not because the
hyponymy relation is not a ISA relation in the formal sense. However the discussion is complicated by the fact that other constructs improperly called taxonomies extracted from Wikipedia or  corpora  are not taxonomies strictly speaking. The other relation
that organize the nouns is meronymy. This is also a linguistic motivated
relation and not very well defined either. In conclusion : Wordnet is not an ontology but everybody calls it a lexical ontology.
Best Regards!
Eduard



On Thursday, August 7, 2014 10:27 PM, Michal Ptaszynski <michal.ptaszynski at gmail.com> wrote:
 


Hi Kiril and others

Just a small thought. 

- 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 of papers in NLP and CL describe research with the use of ontologies, even unintentionally. 

Best,
--
Michal Ptaszynski

Dnia 6 sie 2014 o godz. 19:43 "Kiril Simov" <kivs at bultreebank.org> napisał(a):


Dear Liling,
> 
>The book on Wordnet is:
> 
>WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database
>edited by
>Christiane Fellbaum
>MIT Press, 1998
> 
>Thus, Wordnet is an electronic lexical database.
> 
>Nicola Guarino in his lecture at the First OntoLex Workshop 2000
>defines precision of ontologies like:
> 
>- 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)
> 
>Thus, WordNet is a kind of ontology.
> 
>With best regards,
> 
>Kiril 
>From: liling tan 
>Sent: Wednesday, August 06, 2014 12:57 PM
>To: corpora at uib.no 
>Subject: [Corpora-List] WordNet vs Ontology
>  Dear corpora linguists, 
> 
>There is recently a discussion on stackoverflow about "wordnet vs 
ontology". I would like your perspective on several issues about wordnet and 
ontology:
> 
>- Is wordnet an ontology? If it is not an ontology, what is it?
> 
>- What is the definition of an ontology? Is anything 
(words/concept/entities) under a hierarchical structure some sort of linguistic 
ontology?
> 
>- Are linguistic onotology / information science ontology subjected to only 
upper and domain ontology?
> 
>- Any other comments about ontology and wordnet?
> 
>Regards,
>liling
> 
> 
>________________________________
> _______________________________________________
>UNSUBSCRIBE from this page: http://mailman.uib.no/options/corpora
>Corpora mailing 
list
>Corpora at uib.no
>http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora
>
_______________________________________________
UNSUBSCRIBE from this page: http://mailman.uib.no/options/corpora
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/corpora/attachments/20140807/aadfdbbc/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
UNSUBSCRIBE from this page: http://mailman.uib.no/options/corpora
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora