[Corpora-List] WordNet vs Ontology

[Ken Litkowski]

In this discussion, ontology has been characterized as being in "some 
domain of interest". It would seem to me that our goal should be a 
classification of all existing things (not to exclude the narrower 
types). The Brandeis Shallow Ontology attempts to do this, and 
incidentally is being used to characterize arguments of verbs in Patrick 
Hanks corpus pattern analysis, i.e., in the imperfect world of language.

     Ken

On 8/7/2014 5:21 PM, John F Sowa wrote:
> 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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-- 
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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