Pamela Faber & Pilar León & Arianne Reimerink - Frame-based Knowledge Representation in Coastal Engineering

The linguistic representation of specialized knowledge concepts should be more than a list or even a configuration of objects translated into either simple or compound nominal forms. Recent research in cognitive neuroscience shows that this type of static, amodal vision of conceptual structure is lacking in psychological adequacy. According to Barsalou (2003: 552), the conceptual system develops to serve situated action, and at the broad level of organization, an important class of categories arises to streamline the action-environment interface. Consequently, a more believable representational system, and one more in consonance with empirical evidence would be frame-based. Such frames would be dynamic and process-oriented with goal-derived categories that provide mappings from roles in action sequences to instantiations in the environment.   This has evident consequences for Terminology or the representation of specialized knowledge at both the micro- as well as macrostructural level. In this article we show how this type of frame-based representation can be applied to the field of Coastal Engineering. At a macrostructural level specialized knowledge concepts are organized according to their conceptual category. At the most generic level, categories are configured in a prototypical domain event or action-environment interface (Barsalou 2003: 513; Faber, Márquez, and Vega, 2005), which provides a frame for the organization of more specific concepts. This type of frame is the basis for corpus-based ontologies that take propositional inferences into account and relate categories within this general event structure. The linguistic theoretical frameworks most applicable here are those with an enriched semantic component, such as Frame Semantics (Fillmore 1985) for the macrostructural representation, and the premises of the Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky 1995) for the microstructural representation.   At the microstructural level, we apply Pustejovsky’s qualia structure (1995) to the field of Coastal Engineering, more specifically to the concepts DREDGE, DREDGING, and DREDGER. We show how the four qualia structure roles can be applied at two levels: (1) the frame level of the Coastal Engineering Event; (2) the definitional structure of the concepts. Furthermore, we analyze the relation between the meaning of specialized concepts, from the perspective of their qualia structure, with the predicate meaning and argument structure they generally appear with in specialized texts.

References

Barsalou, Lawrence W. (2003): Situated Simulation in the Human Conceptual System. Language and Cognitive Processes 18, 513-562.

Faber, Pamela, Márquez Linares, Carlos, and Vega Expósito, Miguel (2005). Framing Terminology: A Process-Oriented Approach. META  50 (4): CD-ROM.

Fillmore Charles J. (1985). Frames and the Semantics of Understanding. Quaderni di Semantica 6: 222-253.

Pustejovsky, J. (1995). The Generative Lexicon. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press.