Some Lexical Issues of UNL
Igor Boguslavsky · 2005
The Universal Networking Language (UNL) developed by Dr. H. Uchida at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the United Nations Uni- versity is a meaning representation language designed for multi-lingual com- munication in electronic networks, information retrieval, summarization and other applications. We discuss several features of this language relevant for cor- rect meaning representation and multi-lingual generation and make some pro- posals aiming at increasing its efficiency. 1 UNL Approach to the Lexicon The Universal Networking Language (UNL) developed by Dr. H. Uchida at the Insti- tute for Advanced Studies of the United Nations University is a meaning representa- tion language designed for multi-lingual communication in electronic networks, in- formation retrieval, summarization and other applications. Formally, a UNL expression is an oriented hypergraph that corresponds to a natu- ral language sentence in the amount of information conveyed. The arcs of the graph are interpreted as semantic relations of the types agent, object, time, reason, etc. The nodes of the graph can be simple or compound. Simple nodes are special units, the so- called Universal Words (UWs) which denote a concept or a set of concepts. A com- pound node (hypernode) consists of several simple or compound nodes connected by semantic relations. In addition to propositional content (who did what to whom), UNL expressions are intended to capture pragmatic information such as focus, reference, speaker's atti- tudes and intentions, speech acts, and other types of information. This information is rendered by means of attributes attached to the nodes. After 6 years of the UNL project development, it is possible to take stock of what has been achieved and what remains to be done. In this presentation, I am going to concentrate on one of the central problems with which any artificial language is faced if it is designed to represent meaning across different natural languages. It is a prob- lem of the language vocabulary. I would like to single out three distinctive features of the UNL dictionary organiza- tion.