...http://crl.nmsu.edu/users/mahesh/onto-intro-page.html
The 10#10K ontology is available to interested researchers in a variety of forms including C++ objects, Lisp-like lists, or plain ASCII text. Interfaces for browsing the ontology and searching for concepts are also available in several forms. Further information may be obtained from the author or on the World Wide Web at the above address.
...1989).
This and the following subsections in Section 1 reuse parts of the introductory text in Mahesh and Nirenburg (1995a; 1995b).
...languages.
The current system prototype is an analyzer of Spanish.
...Russian.
Construction of Japanese and Russian lexicons has begun recently. Although the ontology is already being used for representing lexical meanings in all three languages, the 23#23K analyzer has so far only been tested on Spanish texts.
...ACQUIRE
Names of concepts in the ontology are shown in small capitals in this report.
...1995b).
In parallel, a Spanish lexicon that maps lexemes to concepts in this ontology is also being acquired on a massive scale.
...entities
Free-standing entity is not an actual concept in the ontology; we use the term when describing the top-level organization of the ontology in order to distinguish between OBJECTs and EVENTs on the one hand and PROPERTYs on the other.
...slot.
See Section 6.4 for an exception in the case of Range specifications of LITERAL-ATTRIBUTEs.
...instantiated;
They may, however, be instantiated in a TMR by means of a reification operation (e.g., Russell and Norvig, 1995), thereby making them stand-alone instances in the TMR. Such reification can also be triggered from the lexicon.
...ontology.
``Measuring unit'' has been used as the name of the facet as well as the concept. The facet should perhaps be renamed as ``Unit.'' However, this facet is not used much in the ontology.
...relation.
There are other reasons for adding redundant links. A slot must have a filler. In fact, our acquisition tool does not retain a slot that has no fillers. As such, we are sometimes forced to introduce a redundant filler just to retain the slot. We would want to retain a slot to fulfill lexical requirements for indicating to the analyzer that it should look for a filler for this slot whenever the concept is instantiated.
...graph.
See any textbook on artificial intelligence for an explanation of And-Or graphs. For example, see Rich and Knight (1991).
...``medical-serve-back-end,''
It may also be noted here that such long names may violate the kind of naming guidelines outlined later in this document.
...concept
We use the term complex concept because we might have a need for complex objects at some point in addition to complex events (and be able to use the same representation for both). However, only the representation of complex events is discussed here.
...place.
Of course, it is possible to introduce a ``number-of-organizations'' ATTRIBUTE and fill (> 2) in it, but that is a hack and is redundant with the way we represent sets. Since we employ set notations in our meaning representations, we should be able to use cardinalities of sets to represent the minimum-2 requirement for MERGE. Using sets implies using more than one frame to represent the MERGE concept.
...concept.
The issue of generic instances is a separate one; it deals with instances of concepts, simple or complex, such as ``the Big Mac,'' that do not refer to any particular entity in the world.
...language;
Although, for practical reasons, one might want to introduce phrasal lexical entries such as compound nouns that map directly to many concepts in the ontology.
...lexicon.
This ratio is expected to go up to about 6 once the lexicon is populated by entries generated automatically by means of a derivational morphology engine currently under development.
...(1995)
Some of these principles are very well known and, in fact, date back to Aristotle.
...principle.
Surprisingly, Bouaud et. al (1995) argue that there is no need for multiple inheritance and that ontologies should be simple trees. We find this vastly inadequate for our requirements and those of most knowledge representation systems.
...text.
CASE-ROLEs are also PROPERTYs in the ontology; the issue here is the need for PROPERTYs other than CASE-ROLEs.
...further.
This section is based on a summary of a debate on this topic between Victor Raskin, Sergei Nirenburg, and the author. This subsection is adapted from a summary written by Victor Raskin.
...hierarchies.
We may need a formalism to relate one hierarchy to the other. Such a formalism in the form of ``ontological generative rules'' is currently in the works.
...literals.
Computational mechanisms for dealing with such modifications of literal values are yet to be worked out in the 88#88K system.
...concepts.
The special symbol *unknown* used in lexicons and TMRs provides some power to express the existence of an unknown filler in a slot.
...ontology.
Parts of this section are based on work presented by the author and Sergei Nirenburg at the 1995 meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse in Albuquerque, NM.
...tool
Developed by Ralf Brown at the Center for Machine Translation, Carnegie Mellon University.
...ontology.
The analysis of ``swim'' and ``float'' shown above was an exception; we were asked to analyze these meanings for presentation and discussion at the Workshop organized by the International Federation of Information Processing, Special Interest Group on Lexical Semantics, April 28-29, 1995, Philadelphia, PA.
...PROPERTYs.
Our acquisition tools help us by complaining if a concept by the same name already exists.
...peaches).
One of our quality control programs finds common substrings across concept names and thereby helps us find uses of the same word in multiple senses.
...status.
The ontology in question (Carlson and Nirenburg, 1990) was much smaller than the current 114#114K ontology. It was constructed for a smaller MT project using tools that were not as sophisticated as our current set of tools. More than all, this ontology was modified more than once by different people to adopt to new domains such as computer repair and restaurants. As such, it is not surprising that it had to be cleaned up before thousands of new concepts from our domain could be added to it.

Kavi Mahesh
Tue Aug 13 09:38:42 MDT 1996