Re: R: WordNet modelling in Lemon and SKOS

Dear all,

  apologies for my silence so far, the last two weeks have been 
extremely busy for me. I have been following all discussion and I am 
happy that they have taken place. Thanks to John for being so active on 
the Bielefeld side.

Concerning this email of Armando but also others, I really think that 
the distinction between intensional and extensional entities or between 
knowledge models of type A and of type B are not really helpful from the 
ontolex model point of view. Aldo might help me to see where I am wrong.

All the entities we have in these models are prima facie intensional 
ones, this holds for WordNet synsets, skos concepts but also owl 
classes. They all might have a gloss etc. that describes this intension 
(Sinn in the terms of Frege) closer. Further, these intensional entities 
might be more or less axiomatized (as in OWL) or not (as in 
Wordnet/SKOS). But in any case they are symbols that represent an 
intension, I agree with Armando here actually.

Note that the extensional interpretation of an OWL concept is not 
inherent in the symbol that represents the intension. The extension is 
assigned by a certain model in the process of interpreting the symbol in 
context to other symbols, i.e. in some possible world that fullfills all 
the constraints introduced by the logical theory. I think the good news 
is that ontolex does not have to care about this extensional 
interpretation of symbols. What we ultimately care about is about their 
intensional component.

This brings me to one issue: maybe we should really avoid to talk about 
"reference" at all in our model thus, as we never really model the 
"Bedeutung" in the extensional sense of a word. The Bedeutung is 
somthing that a symbol acquires in a particular situation or model and 
this should be outside of the ontolex model.

More this afternoon on the telco,

Philipp.

Am 24.04.13 03:38, schrieb Armando Stellato:
> Hi Aldo,
>
> Fine. Actually since the naming of concepts was still to be assessed, 
> and since in some cases we could have been reusing specific classes 
> from existing vocabularies, I used that informal labeling in the upper 
> part of the boxes for clarifying their role, and an explicit reference 
> to the proposed class in the lower one.
> Thus "target conceptual model" was intended to capture actually 
> elements of possibly different models (and in fact the least subsuming 
> class is owl:Thing) so I confirm your hypothesis.
> I must admit I only grasp partially the reason for which we should 
> consider differently type-A and type-B models. My perspective, wrt, 
> for instance, the triangle of Meaning, is that in-any-case what we 
> formally write are still symbols (progressively richer in their 
> description  ), which are then translated into references in our mind 
> which refer to referents in the world.
> And in this sense a synset, for instance, is still a symbol which, 
> thanks to the set of synonyns in it, and the gloss etc.. better drives 
> the access to a reference in our minds than a single word. In terms of 
> Sinn and Bedeutung, an owl:Class has intensional properties as much as 
> a skos:Concept has, plus it may restrict (through a set of formal 
> constraints) its extension, the interpretations of which, however, are 
> still infinite. In this sense, Words, skos:Concepts, owl:Classes are 
> all "expressions", and referents are totally out of our representation 
> game. Thus, any meaning/reference distinction is not really clear to 
> me. Much the same way, how would u consider an owl:Individual wrt a 
> skos:Concept (well actually a concept is an individual in owl terms..) 
> Are not them both purely intensional objects?
> However, I may be easily wrong in that, and will not delve further in 
> the discussion, so one practical question:
> Suppose I've a domain concept scheme (e.g. Agrovoc) and a 
> "conceptualized" lexical resources such as WordNet. Beyond any 
> possible linking to meaning/reference etc.. would you see it as 
> possible to have some form of "tagging" of the domain concept scheme 
> with wordnet's synsets, where it is clear (in ontolex) that the 
> synsets are not (only) mere skos:Concepts (thus to be mapped through 
> ordinary mapping relation, eg from skos) and are instead lexical 
> objects (instances of LexicalConcept in particular) which can be used 
> to enrich the domain concepts?
>
> Cheers,
> Armando
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Da: Aldo Gangemi <mailto:aldo.gangemi@cnr.it>
> Inviato: ‎24/‎04/‎2013 00.28
> A: Armando Stellato <mailto:stellato@info.uniroma2.it>
> Cc: Aldo Gangemi <mailto:aldo.gangemi@cnr.it>; 'John McCrae' 
> <mailto:jmccrae@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de>; 'Philipp Cimiano' 
> <mailto:cimiano@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de>; 'public-ontolex' 
> <mailto:public-ontolex@w3.org>
> Oggetto: Re: WordNet modelling in Lemon and SKOS
>
> Hi Armando, John, all,
>
> On Apr 23, 2013, at 11:19:48 PM , "Armando Stellato" 
> <stellato@info.uniroma2.it <mailto:stellato@info.uniroma2.it>> wrote:
>
>> Dear John,
>> After seeing your updated scheme, I think we are almost there. I had 
>> a short call with Aldo for checking the only one thing I was a bit 
>> uncertain of in his email (the double subclassing he proposed for 
>> WordNet’s WordSense/Synset under the ontolex:LexicalSense umbrella).
>> I’m resuming a few points here, and I ask Aldo to confirm if I’m 
>> properly reporting what we discussed (obviously I’m cutting most of 
>> the conversation and report only the main questions and where we 
>> ended up).
>
> thanks for the summary :)
>
>> Armando: Why both wn:WordSense and wn:Synset subclasses of LexicalSense?
>> Aldo: they are both a form of Meaning. These can be totally disjoint 
>> classes as u said in your email, still being under the same superclass.
>> Armando: Ok, let’s go back to the linking to semiotics.owl… ok for 
>> both wn:WordSense and wn:Synset under semio:Meaning…they are both a 
>> form of meaning (thus both rdfs:subClassOf semio:Meaning) and I 
>> agree… but then, the engineer in me tells: <ok, this is a proper 
>> “tagging”, but how can these be used operatively?> I mean, ok for the 
>> general Meaning class in semiotics.owl, but LexicalSense cannot be an 
>> Umbrella for both too…our ontolex model should be general enough to 
>> cover different resources, and specific enough to cover in detail the 
>> most important aspects of them. To me, I would like WordNet to be 
>> opaquely handled by agents as an instance of a Lexical Resouce 
>> modeled in OntoLex. I’m thinking about some of the use cases, where 
>> smart agents covering given tasks (such as Ontology Mapping) may 
>> benefit of the implicit perspective on WordNet given through OntoLex 
>> glasses (a monolingual resource, with a conceptual structure etc…), 
>> and can adapt this sort of “ontolex fingerprint” of the resource into 
>> their general mapping strategies (this is also where the metadata 
>> part of the language will come into play). “Plugging” another 
>> resource should work as well, as much as its content can be seen 
>> through a proper mapping inside the OntoLex vocabulary.
>> So I suggest to make explicit in our model the existence of “Senses 
>> of LexicalEntries”, let’s call them LexicalSense or just Sense (e.g. 
>> specifically, a superclass of WordSenses in wordnet) and 
>> LexicalConcepts (specifically, a superclass of synsets in WordNet). 
>> Then I agreed that both Sense and LexicalConcept are tagged 
>> (subClassOf) as (different types of) Meanings, for the purpose of 
>> properly representing them under the Triad in semiotics.owl
>> Aldo agrees on having these two distinct elements in OntoLex too, and 
>> bound them under the common umbrella of semio:Meaning.
>
> Confirmed. I have no issue about creating intermediate classes 
> whatsoever, provided we all agree on the intuition about expressions, 
> (intensional) meanings, and (extensional) references.
>
> Concerning the diagram, I'm ok with links and names.
>
> My only observation is about "TargetConceptualModel" (not really 
> discussed with Armando): if that is a class of conceptual models (as 
> the name suggests), why should it be a subclass of Reference. I'd call 
> it better OntologyEntity (as Lemon does, as well as LRI, the 
> multilingual ontolex model made in NeOn project in 2008), and put a 
> link between OntologyEntity and the ontology that defines it.
> However, maybe you want to talk about arbitrary conceptual models and 
> their elements. For this I think we need some more clarification, 
> because there are two types of conceptual models:
>
> A) purely intensional conceptual models, like SKOS models, 
> classification schems, thesauri, synsets, lexical frames, etc.
> B) formally interpreted conceptual models, like ontologies, ER 
> schemas, UML class diagrams (under ER-like semantics), etc.
>
> For type-A conceptual models, I am still recalcitrant to accept their 
> elements as references, since no clear extensional intuition is 
> granted, except under a sort of "stipulation" by which I accept the 
> risks of interpreting them extensionally (old SKOS did that by having 
> skos:Concept as both rdfs:subClassOf owl:Thing and of rdfs:Class). I 
> think no default extensional choice like that should be made.
>
> For type-B conceptual models, we can safely adopt the extensional 
> interpretation.
>
> Now, since this community group works under the semantic web and 
> linked data umbrella, I do not see the necessity of forcing our model 
> to deal with debatable choices wrt type-A conceptual models, which can 
> be instead interpreted in the context of the Meaning class (that's 
> because I put skos:Concept as a subclass of semio:Meaning).
>
> I won't be able (last time hopely) to attend Friday's telco, but will 
> be active in the email discussion.
> Ciao
> Aldo
>
>> I’m attaching (and reporting here below) an updated version of the 
>> model I sent in my last email, with the mapping to Semiotics.owl 
>> which followed the discussion with Aldo. As you may see, it is pretty 
>> similar to the last one you sent (modulo naming choices and the 
>> double linking to semio:Meaning).
>> Regarding chosen names, just a couple of comments:
>> 1)I suggested, as a OntoLex superclass for Synset, the name Lexical 
>> Concept (ref. Miller’s paper, where he defines synsets as a form of 
>> “Lexical Concepts”). This captures the idea of a given set of 
>> LexicalEntries hinting at a (non explicit nor formally defined) 
>> concept. Note (not in the figure) that this LexicalConcept may be a 
>> subclass of skos:Concept. An alternative could be 
>> “LexicalizedConcept”, though the former one surely sounds better :-)
>> 2)Conversely, for the other class reifying the sense relationship, 
>> I’m not sure about the appropriateness of the name LexicalSense, as 
>> in this name “Lexical” seems an adjective of “Sense”. But, IMHO, it 
>> is not. LexicalSense is more specifically the sense of a given 
>> Lexical Entry. Thus the proper name should be LexicalEntrySense (in 
>> fact, in WordNet - limiting lexical entries to be words - we have the 
>> class WordSense). However LexicalEntrySense is rather long and 
>> ambiguous to be parsed. Other choice could be SenseOfLexicalEntry 
>> (rather ugly), or simply (my preference), Sense. Btw, just my small 
>> note on that and absolutely can be left as is…but I really cannot 
>> grasp the meaning of such an expression.  Simply, the step from the 
>> expression “LexicalSense” to its intended meaning of “Sense of a 
>> Lexical Entry” to me is not intuitive.
>> 3)I chose the ontolex:sense property to go from LexicalEntry to 
>> LexicalConcept. To me it is intuitive, as (grounding to WordNet, for 
>> instance), the sense of a Word lies in its linking to a Synset (or in 
>> general, to a unit of meaning). And then we can reify this relation 
>> into a Sense class as there can be many important things to say about 
>> it. However, I understand that following ontology modelling 
>> conventions, one could expect the ontolex:sense property to link to 
>> instances of a Sense class… so open to opinions (and proposals) for 
>> this property renaming. Even those from John’s last model could be 
>> reasonable.
>> Cheers,
>> Armando
>> <image005.png>
>> *From:*johnmccrae@gmail.com 
>> <mailto:johnmccrae@gmail.com>[mailto:johnmccrae@gmail.com 
>> <http://gmail.com>]*On Behalf Of*John McCrae
>> *Sent:*venerdì 19 aprile 2013 10.44
>> *To:*Armando Stellato
>> *Cc:*Aldo Gangemi; Philipp Cimiano; public-ontolex
>> *Subject:*Re: WordNet modelling in Lemon and SKOS
>> Hi,
>> While Aldo's model is very elegant it is not possible to have lexical 
>> sense as a subset of skos:Concept for a simple reason: the lexical 
>> sense is defined for only a single lexeme, while the skos:Concept can 
>> be used for multiple lexemes.
>> For this key reason we need to have a "lexical sense" object that is 
>> between the lexical entry and its meaning. If you are uncomfortable 
>> with this object then you can view it as a simple reification 
>> (although I would contend it is a very real object). In fact this is 
>> nothing more than the traditional lexicographic "word sense", see 
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_sense.
>> I rename the "lexical sense" object of Aldo's model to "concept" or 
>> following WordNet a "synset"
>
> [il messaggio originale non è incluso]


-- 
Prof. Dr. Philipp Cimiano
Semantic Computing Group
Excellence Cluster - Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC)
University of Bielefeld

Phone: +49 521 106 12249
Fax: +49 521 106 12412
Mail: cimiano@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de

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