RE: synsem module

Dear all,

 

my (really poor) two cents:

 

I agree mostly with John, except that, well, yes, I wouldn’t be so close wrt introducing frames ion general. But I suspect this is again a matter of principle: either we want to *only* have a model which coherently depicts things in a given way, or we may *also* want to represent existing resources according to it. One of the things in the limbo between the two approaches has always been the representation of existing lexical resources. This is, by definition, not in the scope of OntoLex, though, in the absence of existing RDF models for lexical resources, inevitably (IMHO) it should be addressed.

 

So, to me it wouldn’t be bad to have a frame resources module, and I see a SemanticFrame in there. Again, my preference goes to have the possibility of seeing existing resources not depicted by their own ontology (e.g. FrameNet ontology), but rather seen under a larger umbrella.

However, I don’t see any kind of inclusion (in a sense or the other) with LexicalSense, and I better see it as a separate object.

 

Cheers,

 

Armando

 

 

From: johnmccrae@gmail.com [mailto:johnmccrae@gmail.com] On Behalf Of John P. McCrae
Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2014 11:12 AM
To: Philipp Cimiano; Philipp Cimiano
Cc: public-ontolex@w3.org; public-ontolex@w3.org
Subject: Re: synsem module

 

Hi,

 

On Wed, Jul 9, 2014 at 12:32 PM, Philipp Cimiano <cimiano@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de <mailto:cimiano@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de> > wrote:

Dear all,

 I am working through the synsem module, see my updates on the GIT repository.

I do not have major changes of this module other than the following two:

1) I have changed a number of definitions to make them clearer, please check and let me know if the definitions are fine.

2) For the sake of symmetry, I propose to add a class "SemanticFrame" as a counterpart to Frame, which represents a syntactic frame, essentially capturing the valence or subcat behaviour of a given lexical entry. This SemanticFrame would essentially be a subclass of LexicalSense, and would leave the other parts of the model essentially untouched. I feel that having this symmetry (syntactic and semantic side) makes the model more elegant and clearer. Some people will be looking for something like this. Essentially, a SemanticFrame would represent a gestalt-like conceptual construction that represents the meaning of a lexical entry.

I have chosen the following definition for the "SemanticFrame" class: A Semantic Frame is a coherent structure of related concepts that are related such that without knowledge of all of them, one does not have complete knowledge of any one; they are in that sense types of gestalt. The coherent structure is represented by one or more predicates from a given ontology.

I'm not sure what this brings us, it adds an extra class (which inevitably increases complexity and confusion) for no technical advantage. That is do we really have a concrete example where it would be good to use a SemanticFrame instead of a LexicalSense?

 

Also, I am not sure that the axiomatization of SemanticFrame as a subclass of LexicalSense makes sense... in particular is it not the case that every LexicalSense is a SemanticFrame as it refers to a concept in the ontology and is thus simply mapped to the argument structure of the ontological predicate, thus every lexical sense necessarily is associated with a semantic frame. If we agree that SemanticFrame ⊒ LexicalSense, we should then ask is there is a semantic frame that is not a lexical sense? Firstly, from the point of view of OntoLex all semantic is in the ontology, therefore a semantic frame must also refer to the ontology, thus we need only ask if there is such a thing as a non-lexicalized semantic frame? The conclusion that was reached in Monnet was that there was no such thing, or at least such a thing is not relevant is not to OntoLex (as we only wish to describe how ontologies are lexicalized), thus we could say that LexicalSense ≡ SemanticFrame and eliminate the unnecessary synonym from the model. 

 

>From a strategic standpoint, I think that we should avoid adding the semantic frame in because "people will be looking for something like this". The fact that people will look for this means that if they find something with a name like this that doesn't actually work like they expect then they are guaranteed to misuse it! Instead, if they find a clear documentation of why such an object does not exist (i.e, "semantics is in the ontology") then that will help them far more than introducing a confusing subclass. 

 

The definition as it stands currently is also weak for similar reasons... if a semantic frame is a "structure represented by one or more predicates from an ontology", why is it in the lexicon not entirely in the ontology??

 

Regards,

John

 


Please check the ontology, the examples etc. and help me to debug the ontology, description and examples.

Best regards,

Philipp.




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Prof. Dr. Philipp Cimiano
 
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Mail: cimiano@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de <mailto:cimiano@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de> 
 
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