uK employs an ontological graph search function (Onyshkevych, 1995) to
check constraints. This function determines relevant paths between
two concepts and returns a score based on their degree of closeness.
For example, check-onto-con(ACQUIRE EVENT)
returns a score of 1.0 (out of 1.0) since
ACQUIRE is a type of EVENT. However,
check-onto-con(ORGANIZATION HUMAN) returns a score of 0.9 along with
the path (ORGANIZATION HAS-MEMBER HUMAN). This indicates that
ORGANIZATION can stand in the place of HUMAN because it has HUMAN
members. This and other types of metonymy are frequent in natural
language and are detected automatically by uK.