Ontology Development for Machine Translation:
Ideology and Methodology

Kavi Mahesh

MCCS-96-292

Computing Research Laboratory
New Mexico State University

The Computing Research Laboratory was established by the
New Mexico State Legislature
under the Science and Technology Commercialization Commission
as part of the Rio Grande Research Corridor.

Table of Contents

• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction to the Mikrokosmos Ontology
  • The MT Situation
  • What Is an Ontology?
  • A Situated Ontology
  • What Does the Ontology Do for NLP?
  • Computational Ontologies for NLP
  • Our Product: The Mikrokosmos Ontology
• The Structure of the Ontology
  • Slots and Facets
    • Special Slots
  • Subgraph Patterns in the Ontology
    • The RELATION Pattern
    • The ATTRIBUTE Pattern
  • A Taxonomy of Symbols
    • Characteristics of Literal Symbols
  • The Need for Nonmonotonic Inheritance
  • Other Structural Problems
  • Complex Events: A Proposal and its Rejection
    • Implications of Introducing Complex Concepts
    • Ontological Instances
• Principles of Ontology Design
  • Ontology Development: Desiderata
  • Limited Expressiveness and Usability
  • Structural Principles and Why We Violate Them
• Ontology as a Sharable Resource
  • Sharability and the Ten Commitments
  • Ontologies for MT Encyclopedia
• Ontological Redundancy: A Theoretical Problem
  • Duality between States and PROPERTYs
    • Duality between OBJECTs and PROPERTYs
    • Duality between EVENTs and PROPERTYs
    • On the Need for Properties in the Ontology
  • Duality between OBJECTs and EVENTs
• Constraints on Concept Representation
  • PROPERTYs are Not Stand-Alone Concepts
  • PROPERTYs Cannot be Fillers in Other Slots of OBJECTs and EVENTs
  • Binary RELATIONs Only
  • Literal and Scalar ATTRIBUTEs
  • All Scoping Is over Concepts
• Ontology Acquisition: Situated Development
  • Approaches to Ontology Acquisition
  • The Situated Methodology
  • Technology for Ontology Development
    • The Customer Support Interface
  • Distinctions between the Ontology and the Onomasticon
  • Case Study: What Concepts to Add to the Ontology
  • Guidelines
    • Guidelines for Deciding What Concepts to Put in
    • General Guidelines and Constraints
    • Guidelines for Naming Concepts
• The Development of the Mikrokosmos Ontology
  • Quality Improvement
    • Ways of Controlling the Quality of the Ontology
• Acknowledgements
• References
• Appendix A: BNF for the Mikrokosmos Ontology
• Appendix B: Axiomatic Specification of the Mikrokosmos Ontology
• About this document ...