I am not a specialist in the Philosophy of Language, but if "Entity" can be used generically to include objects, relations, events, etc then it's probably okay to stick with it. I do share the same concern about the standard interpretation of relation vs entity in NLP circles.
I do think you're right that I can consider myself a "Referent" (something that can be referred to) so that may be a way out.
Karin On May 14, 2008, at 2:05 PM, David Ferrucci wrote: We intend for "entity" to represent any thing in some domain of discourse that an annotation may refer to. Including objects, relations, events, sets etc. We consulted a few sources and chatted with Chris Welty a bit on this. I think we may be OK with "entity"..... While it usage may have evolved in some circles to exclude things like relations, it seems inclusive from the basic philosophical and ontological perspective. ===== An entity is something that has a distinct, separate existence, though it need not be a material existence. In particular, abstractions and legal fictions are usually regarded as entities. An entity could be viewed as a set containing subsets. -- Wikipedia "To be assumed as an entity is, purely and simply, to be reckoned as the value of a variable." -- Quine ===== A concern is that in NLP circles the distinction seems common where name-entity detection is considered distinct from relationship detection for example where arguments to relations are "entities". It is also common in database modeling. Entity-Relationship models (Chen) for example make a clear distinction between constructs that represent entities in the domain and constructs that represent domain relations. Of course both these simply become relations (i.e. tables) at the data model level. I don't think 'denotation' is right. Going back to are original intent this thing (now called 'entity') should represent really anything that may be referred to including individuals. I like "Referent" (adam's suggestion) since this divorces us from any ontological commitment and focuses on the role a domain object plays relative to an annotation. That is, the annotation refers to it and it is referred to by the annotation. Then any domain model with any root may be built independently of 'Referent" and any concept in the domain can play the role of a Referent with respect to an Annotation. This approach while loosely coupling the domain model to the annotation structure, introduces another layer of indirection through Referent. So any additional referent object is required for ever domain object linked to an annotation -- not good. I think semanticType is wrong because that is not the root of all domain objects. We may all agree a Person is an Animal but I personally do not consider myself a 'semanticType' or a 'denotation' for that matter. I do consider myself an Entity however. And I would accept that I may be referred to by an annotation over a mention in a document. If we go back to Quine, "Entity" is the root of the most basic ontology and subsumes objects, relations, sets and even syntactic constructs like Classes and Predicates (this according to Welty -- I did not cross check with Quine). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ David A. Ferrucci, PhD Senior Manager, Semantic Analysis & Integration Chief Architect, UIMA IBM T.J. Watson Research Center 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, NY 10532 Tel: 914-784-7847, 8/863-7847 ferrucci@us.ibm.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ http://www.ibm.com/research/uima (possible options for changing the name of the Entity type to be more general) Denotation Extension Semantics Concept SemanticClass SemanticType I do like the suggestion of Denotation. But then I'm not a philosopher so I'm not entirely sure the philosophers would agree that this is an appropriate use of that term. Karin -- Karin Verspoor, PhD Research Assistant Professor Center for Computational Pharmacology, University of Colorado Denver PO Box 6511, MS 8303, Aurora, CO 80045 USA karin.verspoor@uchsc.edu / tel: (720) 279-4875 / campus: 4-3758
-- Karin Verspoor, PhD Research Assistant Professor Center for Computational Pharmacology, University of Colorado Denver PO Box 6511, MS 8303, Aurora, CO 80045 USA karin.verspoor@uchsc.edu / tel: (720) 279-4875 / campus: 4-3758
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