RE: SUO: Re: Finding an upper ontology
Richard,
It sounds like you've already looked at WordNet, but it has at least
some of what you may be working on - a list of verbs that state actions
that are implied by the occurrence of an action of the first verb. For
example, killing causes dying
<http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn1.7.1?stage=2&word=killing&posnumber=2&searchtypenumber=14&senses=1&showglosses=1>.
SUMO expands on this a bit since there are axioms that can define a whole
set of things which follow from the occurrence of an action, and which are
more specific than the informal WordNet gloss. A counterpart to the above
WordNet example is in SUMO at
<http://192.168.200.76:8080/sigma/skb.jsp?req=skb_sx&skb=SUMO_skb&term=Killing>
where the second rule states not only that a Death occurs as the result of
a Killing but that the experiences of the Death is the object of the Killing.
Adam
At 01:43 PM 6/9/2003 -0700, Richard Cooper wrote:
>Jean-Luc Delatre wrote:
> >
> > Richard Cooper wrote in:
> >
> <http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg09686.html>http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg09686.html
>
> >
> > [snip]
> >
> > Philosophers and metaphysicians are not going to take you seriously
> > if you pretend to tackle the problem only at some syntactic level,
> > that is, by looking at the common structure of sentences
> > (yet, above the lexical level of character
> > codes and XML tags).
>
>I intended to define a representation of the words that were
>used, which is syntactic, along with the several meanings
>that were used to represent the OAV attributions of the
>understanding process. So I didn't mean to imply that ONLY
>the syntactic process is needed. I just wanted to explore
>a way to represent the sequence of assertions or inferences
>that are drawn from the utterance, much in the same way
>that the registry is being discussed as a way to organize
>the OAV assignments in ontologies and in the IFF.
>
>Previously, I've played with this kind of idea in relating
>dynamically changing OAV assignments in the context of events.
>Since sentences in a discourse describe a sequence of events,
>what I'm looking for is a way to organize the OAV history,
>which is the semantic end product of the understanding process,
>against the initial sentential forms that lead to the OAV
>attributions.
>
>The reason I find this interesting is that it could provide
>a sort of IDE for debugging theories of language understanding
>against available ontologies, when and if they do become
>available.
>
> > PARADOXICALLY that might be the way to go!
> > Because, (witness the arguments between John Sowa and Stephen
> > Downes in:
> >
> <http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg09664.html>http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg09664.html)
>
> > reaching an agreement on MEANING, even the meaning of
> > "nothing" is probably hopeless!
>
>Most conversations are dynamic because people are changing
>their word use and syntax to match the understanding process
>of transferring information back and forth among them.
>So although no two of use will ever agree about a large
>dictionary, each one in a conversation maintains a
>dynamically changing dictionary. Conversation changes them.
>
>[snip]
>
> > But, are not we talking to each other at this very moment?
> > And does not those furious postings make SOME sense to everybody?
> >
> > Of course, surely not the same sense to everyone, but there
> > is some SHARED meaning,
> > albeit the "share" could be different and differently
> > distorted for each of us.
>
>[snip]
> >
> > By assuming "similar" meanings of the same word used by
> > different locutors
> > we get perilously close to the "Cyc philosophy" (identical
> > meanings) which is known to fail.
>
>Why do you feel that it is known to fail? Even WordNet
>uses alternative synsets for the same spelling. We all
>use WordNet words in some of those synset forms, as well
>as other forms and words not in WordNet. That doesn't mean
>that WordNet fails. It simply means that the complexity
>of language is so high that we can't find a simple solution.
>This is not unexpected after all the limited success of
>every language understanding project so far.
>
>[snip]
>
> > Cheers.
> >
> > -- Jean-Luc Delatre
>
>Thanks,
>Rich