Fwd: Re: [topicmapmail] Primitive roles.

[Thomas B. Passin]

Thanks for the lengthy, considered response, Murray!

Tom P

Murray Altheim wrote:

> Thomas B. Passin wrote:
> 
>> Teresa Silio wrote:
>>> [...]
>>
>> Murray didn't say so just now, but he has created a set of subject 
>> indicators for a more-or-less standard collection of thematic roles. 
>> I'm not sure whether he considers them to be publicly released at the 
>> moment, but  perhaps he would comment.
> 
> 
> Tom,
> 
> The specific roles you're talking about are the 23 Conceptual
> Graphs relations as originally published by John Sowa, then
> documented nicely as part of a CG course by Ulrik Petersen, Henrik
> Schärfe, and Peter Øhrstrøm [CG]. There was some discussion of a
> collaboration between myself, yourself and a few others, but this
> did not work out. As you know, I've gained permission to use Ulrik's
> text and will be publishing the PSI set as part of the rest of the
> sets I have planned, which form modules in a larger ontology. If
> it becomes valuable to others for me to release any or all of the
> ontology prior to my intended schedule, I'm certainly willing
> insofar as I'm able, timewise.
> 
> Teresa and I have begun a correspondence on this issue since at
> first glance it seems that our respective research has a lot of
> overlap. We both are interested in collaboration, so perhaps some
> publication will come out of this... too early to tell of course.
> 
> My feeling is that yes, these do form a good basis for a prototype
> of roughly two dozen roles, but it's hard for me to understand how
> the complexity of natural language can be *computationally*
> devolved to one of these 23 roles, given that in any instance a
> specific word can conceivably have one or more meanings influenced
> by an enormous variety of contexts, inflections, metaphors, etc.
> The set is fine for general KR (declarative) modeling, which is
> what CG was designed for, but for indexing entire texts via
> linguistic analysis (where each key word playing a role would be
> computationally assigned one of these 23 roles), this seems like
> quite an oversimplification. But then again, the viability of
> this approach depends a lot on the specific requirements of the
> project. CL has done some very interesting things with texts
> taken en toto, but I've not seen anything to suggest that a
> discrete sentence can be "understood" very accurately -- too many
> variables. I probably need to better understand what Teresa's
> trying to accomplish (even if I were to assume I'd be a good
> judge) before making any further foot-in-mouth statements.
> 
> That said, I'm pretty enthusiastic about the whole idea. It
> reminds me of another unfinished project, that of a PSI set
> for an Order Relation, which would be a primitive I believe
> necessary as the foundation of the 23. I think Bernard and I
> have been a bit too busy to tackle this, but this serves as
> a reminder. I've got a very rough but functional version of
> this as part of Ceryle, but in order for this to be useful
> it needs to be much better defined and documented.
> 
> We have a lot to do... but best in the process not to follow
> the altogether too-common tendency to reinvent another wheel
> or widget.
> 
> Murray
> 
> [CG] http://www.huminf.aau.dk/cg/
> ......................................................................
> Murray Altheim                    http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
> Knowledge Media Institute
> The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK               .
> 
>          "Instead of buckin' your head against a stone
>           wall, sit quietly with hands folded and wait
>           for the walls to crumble."   -- Henry Miller
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-- 
Thomas B. Passin
Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web (Manning Books)
http://www.manning.com/catalog/view.php?book=passin