Ontological semantics

This book is divided into two parts: a philosophical part I and a practical part II, in which the authors present their text-meaning representation (TMR) and demonstrate how it is used in language analysis and critique many alternative views of semantics.

Abstract

This book introduces ontological semantics, a comprehensive approach to the treatment of text meaning by computer. Ontological semantics is an integrated complex of theories, methodologies, descriptions and implementations. In ontological semantics, a theory is viewed as a set of statements determining the format of descriptions of the phenomena with which the theory deals. A theory is associated with a methodology used to obtain the descriptions. Implementations are computer systems that use the descriptions to solve specific problems in text processing. Implementations of ontological semantics are combined with other processing systems to produce applications, such as information extraction or machine translation. The theory of ontological semantics is built as a society of microtheories covering such diverse ground as specific language phenomena, world knowledge organization, processing heuristics and issues relating to knowledge representation and implementation system architecture. The theory briefly sketched above is a top-level microtheory, the ontological semantics theory per se. Descriptions in ontological semantics include text meaning representations, lexical entries, ontological concepts and instances as well as procedures for manipulating texts and their meanings. Methodologies in ontological semantics are sets of techniques and instructions for acquiring and