Ben asked:
What is the semantics of
?on-situation-localized-14 rdf:type texai:On-SituationLocalized
On-SituationLocalized is a term I created for this use case, while postponing
its associated definitional assertions. What I have in mind is that
On-SituationLocalized is a specialization of SitutationLocalized in which some
object is "on" some other object. Because the Texai KB is derived from the
rule-lacking, RDF-compatible subset of OpenCyc, I am postponing for now the
representation of required commonsense rules about these terms.
Ben asked:
How would your system parse
"The book is on neuroscience"
or
"The book is on the Washington Monument"
or
"The book is on fire"
or
"The book is on my shit list"
Construction Grammar (CxG) is differs from other grammars in that there is much
less emphasis on grammar rules. Its basic principle is that language consists
of pairings between form and meaning. That is, humans acquire these pairings
as young children, matching their parent's intentions with some signs or
utterances. As they develop linguistic skills, humans induce that patterns
exist among these pairings, allowing novel combinations to be understood and
produced. According to CxG, there is no universal grammar, there are no
grammar rules constraining what is well-formed or not, and there may not even
be lexical categories (e.g. nouns, adverbs, etc.) Therefore, from the viewpoint
of CxG, your example variations of the "on construction" have their own
associated semantics, and are necessarily covered by the rules that I developed
for my sense of "on". In my system the construction rules are adopted from
Double R Grammar, which renounces traditional
lexical categories in favor of functional, semantically motivated
constituents, namely (1) objects, things that can be referenced and (2)
relationships among referents. Double R Grammar thus facilitates the mapping
of text form to semantics.
Let's pretend that the Texai dialog system for lexical acquisition exists, and
that the system is to learn constructions for your examples. The below dialog
is Controlled English, in which the system understands and generates
constrained syntax and vocabulary.
[user] Do you understand "The book is on neuroscience"?
[texai] Not entirely, neuroscience is not a physical location, how can the book
be on it?
[user] The utterance means that the book is about neuroscience.
[texai] Could I generalize "on neuroscience" to any field of scientific
discovery, such as "on Astronomy", and mean that the book is about Astronomy?
[user] yes
[texai] Could I generalize field of scientific discovery to some general
region, such "on deep space?"
[user] yes, this role can be generalized to any topic.
[texai] In the utterance "the book is on Mars" entail both the interpretation
that (1) the book is physically located on Mars, and (2) the book is about the
topic Mars?
[user] yes
...
[user] Do you understand "the book is on fire?"
[texai] Yes, the book is about the topic fire.
[user] There is another, more common, interpretation: There is a fire in which
the book is the thing that is burning.
[texai] Could I generalize fire to any decomposition process, such as rot?
[user] no
...
[user] Do you understand "the book is on my shit-list?"
[texai] Yes, the book is about the topic shit-list.
[user] There is another, more common, interpretation: There is a shit-list,
and the book is an element of the list.
[texai] I know from Wiktionary that a shitlist is "a group of people who a
person holds in disregard", but a book is not a person.
[user] The elements of a shit-list can be things.
[texai] Now I understand that "the book is on my shit-list" commonly means that
the book is an element of the group of things that you hold in disregard.
...
Hope this answers your questions. And thanks for advancing my use case!!!
-Steve
Stephen L. Reed
Artificial Intelligence Researcher
http://texai.org/blog
http://texai.org
3008 Oak Crest Ave.
Austin, Texas, USA 78704
512.791.7860
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