Matters

Review of Ontological Semantics: "Chapter 5 is a survey of formal ontology, an ancient subject that has become the latest hope for conferring interoperability on incompatible systems. Most of that work, however, has not been adapted to natural language processing. Work on lexical resources, such as WordNet, is only loosely connected to the work on formal ontology. Section 5.3 discusses 'the difficult and underexplored part of formal ontology, namely, the relations between ontology and natural language.' The most difficult problem, which the proponents of formal ontology fail to address, is the nature of ambiguities in natural languages. A good parser can enumerate syntactic ambiguities, and selectional constraints are usually sufficient to resolve most of them. The most serious ambiguities are the subtle variations in word senses (sometimes called microsenses), which change over time with variations in word usage or in the subject matter to which the words are applied. Such variations inevitably occur among independently developed systems and web sites, and attempts to legislate a single definition will not stop the growth and shift of meaning. From their long experience with NL processing, Nirenburg and Raskin probably have a deeper understanding of the nature of ambiguity than the proponents of the Semantic Web. Section 5.4 is a wish list of features from formal ontology that NL processors would need. Providing them is still a major research problem."