An Ontological-Semantic Framework for Text Analysis
Boyan A. Onyshkevych · 1997
The Knowledge-Based Machine Translation paradigm requires a comprehensive analysis of input texts into an unambiguous machine-tractable representation of the propositional and meta-propositional meaning of that text, for which we use a particular framework referred to as ontological semantics. The work presented here begins with a definition of a representation language for lexical semantic specification (and syntax/semantics interface) to support such an analysis, as well as a generalized algorithm for building the meaning representation from these lexical semantic specifications, utilizing the ontology and a syntactic parse as knowledge sources. The core of the algorithm is an algorithm for semantic constraint satisfaction and relaxation, involving finding the best path over the ontology between a candidate filler of a relation and semantic constraints on that relation. The ontology is viewed as a multi-dimensional graph, with distinct topologies in each dimension reflecting specific semantic relations between nodes (representing concepts) , where weights or arc distance reflects strength of semantic relatedness in context (where the path-so-far context is maintained in a state transition table).