Ontological Semantics: An Overview – Sergei Nirenburg (University of Maryland, Baltimore County)

When:
February 25, 2003 all-day
2003-02-25T00:00:00-05:00
2003-02-26T00:00:00-05:00

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Abstract
The term ontological semantics refers to the apparatus of describing and manipulating meaning in natural language texts. Basic ontological-semantic analyzers take natural language texts as inputs and generate machine-tractable text meaning representations (TMRs) that form the basis of various reasoning processes. Ontological-semantic text generators take TMRs as inputs and produce natural language texts. Ontological-semantic systems centrally rely on extensive static knowledge resources: a language-independent ontology, the model of the world that includes models of intelligent agents; ontology-oriented lexicons (and onomasticons, or lexicons of proper names) for each natural language in the system; and a fact repository consisting of instances of ontological concepts as well as remembered text meaning representations. Applications of ontological semantics include knowledge-based machine translation, information retrieval and extraction, text summarization, ontological support for reasoning systems, including networks of human and software agents, general knowledge management and others. In this talk I will give a broad overview of some of the ontological-semantic processing and static resources.

Center for Language and Speech Processing