Victor Raskin & Christian F. Hempelmann & Katrina E. Triezenberg - Functional and „Dysfunctional“ Nouns in Ontological Semantics
The paper presents the way functional and other nouns are treated as several disparate classes by ontological semantics. While functional nouns typically emerge as properties, many nouns are actually events. Many others remain where they “belong”, in the object branch of the ontology, but many others are actually frames, or scripts.
Ontological Semantics (OntoSem) is a theoretical computational approach to meaning in natural language, developed over the last couple of decades and implemented in a number of NLP applications, from MT to IR to IE to QA, and most lately, in Internet search. The OntoSem resources include:
* the 6,724-concept ontology,
* a 47,025-entry English lexicon with 77,156 senses,
* a 19,352-entry onomasticon and a total of 24,328 senses,
* a text meaning representation (TMR) language,
* an ontological parser transforming text into TMRs, and
* a fact repository, containing the growing number of implemented TMRs.
The Purdue/hakia.com branch of OntoSem has:
* extended the ontology into several new domains and extended and perfected the methodology and acquisition toolbox for that;
* vastly extended the lexicon and improved/replaced the legacy ontology;
* developed script representation and acquired numerous scripts;
* committed itself to product development beyond the academic limits of proof-of concept and demos, thus facing and handling new challenges.
In OntoSem the expected home for the nouns is the object branch of ontology (see fig. 1), nothing could be further from the semantic reality of this morphosyntactic category.
ALL
EVENT
OBJECT
PROPERTY
Fig. 1
Even the objects are immediately related to events by properties, but many nouns migrate to the other branches. Such English nouns as “statement”, “announcement”, for example, will be anchored in assertive-acts, i.e., events. In sentence (1), the TMR discovers four events, only one of which is introduced by a verb (“refer”) and three by nouns (“migration”, “immigration”, “movement”), while two verbs are treated differently (“exist”, “are”).(1) Although human migration has existed throughout human history, immigration in the modern sense refers to movement of people from one nation-state to another, where they are not citizens.An interesting and difficult subcategory of nouns calls for whole frames, or scripts, or complex events. Thus, “bankruptcy” calls for two complicated scripts, and since we developed it, the number of noun-script representations has significantly grown. In fact, what OntoSem exposes is that even the object nouns, through their agent-of, theme-of, instrument-of properties, are exposed not only as part of scripts but as entities evoking scripts as well. After decades of the Chomskian verb-chauvinistic treatment of language, it is refreshing and essential to focus on the noun. Any competent user of human language, finding himself in Quine’s infamous gavagai situation will not hesitate a second to assign the word to the noun category, rejecting the bizarre “rabbitting”, “rabbitty”, or “rabbitly” interpretations off hand. There is something truly basic in the human naming functionality, in the common-sense, not tortuous-Kripkean, sense of the term. OntoSem cannot provide the answer(s) to the most challenging question(s) arising here, but it hopes to be able to provide an adequate rich-meaning representation framework for the discussion, together with the TMR software producing such representations automatically. As an aside, this phenomenon delivers a coup de grace to formal semantics, by removing its unexamined but absolute premise of the syntactic-semantic isomorphism.