Taxonomic Reasoning and Lexical Semantics
William C. Purdy · Syracuse University Libraries (Syracuse University) · 1990
Taxonomic reasoning is used in many applications, including many-sorted logic, knowledge bases, document retrieval, and natural language processing. These various applications have been dealt with independently. Because they have so much in common, a general approach to taxonomic reasoning would seem to be justified. This paper presents a theory of lexical semantics as an example of such a general approach. The theory defines a representation and an algebra for that representation. The operations of the algebra are inherently parallel, making them well matched to the capabilities of modern computer systems.