Summary of Telco 07.02.2014

Hi all,

So today at the telco we had myself, Paul, Francesca, Elena and Lupe.

We discussed based on Philipp's proposal

I propose we go with the following four variants + translation:
> 1) FormVariant: Relation between two forms of one lexical entry
> 2) LexicalVariant: Relation between two lexical entries that are related
> by some well-defined string-operation (e.g. creating an initialism like in
> FAO)
> 3) TerminlogicalVariant: Relation between two lexical senses (with the
> same reference) of two lexical entries; the lexical entries are thus
> uniquely determined; the senses might have different contextual and
> pragmatic conditions (register, etc.)
> 4) SemanticVariant: As 3) Relation between senses with references that are
> ontologically related, either by subsumption or are children of a common
> superconcept (see my paella and risotto example)
> 5) Translation: As with 3), but involving entries from different languages.
> So we would have one relation between forms (FormVariant), one relation
> between lexical entries (LexicalVariant), and three relations at the sense
> level (TerminologicalVariant, SemanticVariant and Translation).
> We might think about introducing a SenseRelation as a superclass of
> TerminologicalVariant, SemanticVariant and Translation. Hypernym and
> Hyponym would also be a SenseRelation in this sense.


The discussion was as follows:

*Form variants*: We discussed the need to distinguish form (inflectional)
variants as opposed to lexical (entry) variants. The primary reason for
this was to separate variation between LexicalEntrys and Form (as defined
in the core). It was felt that the distinction between form and lexical
variant was too fine-grained and that the modelling of this as variants is
probably not appropriate. For example, if we consider

:Cat a LexicalEntry
  ontolex:canonicalForm :Cat#CanonicalForm (writtenRep "cat"@eng),
  ontolex:otherForm :Cat#PluralForm  (writtenRep "cats"@eng) .

Then modelling the relationship as

:Cat#CanonicalForm ontolex:plural :Cat#PluralForm

is inferior to (especially in the case that there are large number of
inflections of a single lemma, such as an Italian verb)

:Cat#CanonicalForm ontolex:number ontolex:singular .
:Cat#PluralForm ontolex:number ontolex:plural .

For these reasons, it was preferred not to introduce form variants

*Term(inological)Variants/SemanticVariant: *We agreed with the idea of
introducing a superclass SenseRelation subsuming both TermVariants and
SemanticVariants as follows

   - TermVariants have the same reference (e.g., diachronic, diatopic etc.)
   - SemanticVariants have different references (e.g., antonymy, "similar",
   (maybe?) hypernymy)

It was also suggested to shorten the name TerminologicalVariant to
TermVariant

*Translation: *We discussed the idea of distinguishing between (Lemma/Term)
*Translation* and *Culturally-Equivalent Translation *by saying *Translation
* is a *TermVariant * and *Culturally-Equivalent Translation* is a *Semantic
Variant.*
It was suggested that we consider introducing a class
*MultilingualVariant** subsuming
*Translation *and* C.E.T. *and subsumed by *SenseRelation, *for relations
between languages, this would also include broader/narrower cross-lingual
alignments as used in Interlingual Indexes for WordNets etc.
* or cross-lingual variant or inter-lingual variant

I attach a diagram to show the proposal

Regards,
John