Extending reference into cognitive computing: Through the eyes of ontological semantics
Victor Raskin, Libby C Chernouski · 2017
The paper introduces a new issue in semantic processing as necessary for cognitive computing - recognizing and resolving referential ambiguity. Depending on salience and scope, often irresponsibly dismissed as unmanageable “context,” the same noun or verb phrase may refer to an individual unique occurrence of an object, event, or property, all of them, or any subset. The only notion that can cross from language to reality is that of reference that is largely ignored in linguistics and sort of handled somehow in the philosophy of language. After a careful review of reference in the literature, the paper “salvages” it for cognitive computing by outlining its new functionalities, including the computation of salience and scope for referential disambiguation. It becomes a tool for representing and computing human knowledge of the world.