[humanmarkup-comment] FW: [topicmaps-comment] Fw: multilingualthesaurus and ontologies

[psp <beadmaster@ontologystream.com>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Bernard Vatant [mailto:bernard.vatant@mondeca.com]
Sent: Friday, February 01, 2002 4:20 PM
To: topicmaps-comments
Subject: [topicmaps-comment] Fw: multilingual thesaurus and ontologies


This thread has been very lively .. here comes a contribution from John
Sowa, that he
suggested me to forward.

----- Message d'origine -----
De : "John F. Sowa" <sowa@bestweb.net>
À : "Bernard Vatant" <bernard.vatant@mondeca.com>
Envoyé : vendredi 1 février 2002 18:26
Objet : Re: mulitilingual thesaurus and ontologies


> Bernard,
>
> The problem you discuss is a well-known issue that linguists and
> lexicographers have worked on for many years.
>
> The usual approach is to distinguish the word and the word sense,
> where a word sense corresponds to "concept" or "concept type".
> A common example is the English word "know", which has two senses
> that correspond to the French "savoir" and "connaitre" or the
> German "wissen" and "kennen".  Those two word senses of "know"
> are clearly distinguished in English by differences in syntax:
> "know that" -> "savoir", and "know of" -> "connaitre".
>
> An even more ambiguous word is "have", whose senses were discussed
> by Aristotle (in the last chapter of his book _Categories_, the first
> book in the traditional ordering).
>
> For a discussion of these issues, see Section 7 of my paper,
> "Signs, Processes, and Laguage Games":
>
>    http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/signproc.htm
>
> There I distinguish the hierarchy of concept types from the word
> hierarchies of each natural language that maps to those types.
> This distinction is commonly used for WordNet, EDR, and most other
> approaches to representing multilingual lexicons for machine
> translation.  For the references mentioned in that paper, see the
> combined bibliography:
>
>    http://www.jfsowa.com/bib.htm
>
> For a more complex example, see the comparison of the subtypes of
> the English "vehicle" and the Chinese "che" in Figure 4 of that
> paper.

> John Sowa



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