Some Controversial Issues of UNL: Linguistic Aspects
Igor Boguslavsky · Research in Computing Science · 2005
We discuss several linguistic aspects of the Universal Networking Language (UNL); in particular, those connected with Universal Words (UWs), UNL relations, and hypernodes. On the one hand, the language should be rich enough and provide sufficient means to express the knowledge that might be required in the applications it is intended for. On the other hand, it should be simple enough to allow uniform and consistent use across languages and by all encoders. The major expressive device of UNL used for overcoming lexical di- vergence between languages is so-called restrictions. They have three functions, which are relatively independent of each other: the ontological function, the semantic function, and the argument frame function. We discuss various types of restrictions and propose new expressive means for describing UWs. Sample dictionary entries are given which incorporate our proposals. We propose sev- eral new UNL relations and discuss when and how hypernodes should be intro- duced.