Applied Ontology - Volume 14, issue 4

Authors: Basile, Valerio | Caselli, Tommaso | Radicioni, Daniele P.

Article Type: Editorial

DOI: 10.3233/AO-190221

Citation: Applied Ontology, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 335-341, 2019

Authors: Rodrigues, Fabrício Henrique | Abel, Mara

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: This work presents a review of the ideas that are currently in use on the ontology-based conceptual modeling of occurrents (sometimes referred to as “events”, “perdurants”, or “processes”). It collects such ideas from a set of 11 ontologies, which includes some of the most important and widely used upper ontologies (i.e., BFO, UFO, DOLCE, YAMATO, SUMO, GFO). We analyze the ontologies with respect to the definition of occurrent they present and their understanding about participation, mereology, and causation. The commitments regarding these four facets of occurrents are gathered in three categories (pervasive aspects, complementary aspects, and conflicting aspects). Additionally, we …identify the main occurrent classification criteria used to branch the taxonomy of the ontologies. These findings are summarized in two tables at the end of the paper, which may be used by modeling practitioners as reference. The review shows that the considered ontologies agree in a significant set of common aspects as well as present some relevant divergences. However, there is a considerable set of non-conflicting, complementary aspects scattered among the diverse ontologies. It suggests an opportunity for efforts aiming to harmonize those views in a single approach that may enrich the analysis and representation of occurrents. Show more

Keywords: Ontology, occurrents, perdurants, events, processes

DOI: 10.3233/AO-190217

Citation: Applied Ontology, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 343-378, 2019

Authors: Bateman, John A. | Pomarlan, Mihai | Kazhoyan, Gayane

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: A fundamental issue concerning the treatment of meaning in context is how to deal with the extremely flexible relationship that appears to hold between descriptions , which are taken as the exchangeable bearers of meaning, and the actual contexts which those descriptions are taken to pick out. Such contexts appear always only to be suggested, or constrained, by descriptions of contexts and so relating levels of description, such as linguistic utterances, to actual contexts of use, such as a situated, fully embodied environment in which language users find themselves, remains an unsolved challenge. The present article sets out a …framework and illustrative implementation of an approach to contextualization that combines ontological engineering principles and situated embodied simulations. For concreteness, we illustrate the approach within an already established architecture for situated robotic agents in order to allow implementation and experimentation in a manner that is not generally accessible when considering linguistic analysis alone. The paper then proposes a hybrid, multi-level architecture that contextualizes linguistic utterances by means of embodied simulations, which then serve further as contextualization constraints on semantic interpretation. Show more

Keywords: Embodiment, simulation, linguistic semantics, ontological analysis, formal ontology

DOI: 10.3233/AO-190218

Citation: Applied Ontology, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 379-413, 2019

Authors: McShane, Marjorie | Nirenburg, Sergei

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: This paper describes the layers of context leveraged by language-endowed intelligent agents (LEIAs) during incremental natural language understanding (NLU). Context is defined as a combination of (a) the perceptual stimuli available to the agent at the given point in time, and (b) the knowledge elements and reasoning activated at the given stage of the agent’s interpretation of those stimuli. This approach to NLU addresses the treatment of a large number of difficult linguistic phenomena that are essential for high-quality NLU but are not being tackled by the knowledge-lean approaches that are typical of modern-day natural language processing. Although LEIAs are …being developed as components of prototype application systems, this paper is not about implementations or evaluations – its contribution is conceptual, with everything described applicable to any artificial intelligent agent environment. Show more

Keywords: Context, natural language understanding, intelligent agents, computational semantics

DOI: 10.3233/AO-190216

Citation: Applied Ontology, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 415-449, 2019

Authors: Hosseini, Hawre | Nguyen, Tam T. | Wu, Jimmy | Bagheri, Ebrahim

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Within the context of Twitter analytics, the notion of implicit entity linking has recently been introduced to refer to the identification of a named entity, which is central to the topic of the tweet, but whose surface form is not present in the tweet itself. Compared to traditional forms of entity linking where the linking process revolves around an identified surface form of a potential entity, implicit entity linking relies on contextual clues to determine whether an implicit entity is present within a given tweet and if so, which entity is being referenced. The objective of this paper, while …introducing and publicly sharing a comprehensive gold standard dataset for implicit entity linking, is to perform the task of implicit entity linking. The dataset consists of 7,870 tweets, which are classified as either containing implicit entities, explicit entities, both, or neither. The implicit entities are then linked to three levels of entities on Wikipedia, namely coarse-grained level, e.g., Person , Fine-grained level, e.g., Comedian , and the actual entity, e.g., Seinfeld . The proposed model in this work formulates the problem of implicit entity linking as an ad-hoc document retrieval process where the input query is the tweet, which needs to be implicitly linked and the document space is the set of textual descriptions of entities in the knowledge base. The novel contributions of our work include: 1) designing and collecting a gold standard dataset for the task of implicit entity linking; 2) defining the implicit entity linking process as an ad-hoc document retrieval task; and 3) proposing a neural embedding-based feature function that is interpolated with prior term dependency and entity-based feature functions to enhance implicit entity linking. We systematically compare our work with existing work in this area and show that our method is able to provide improvements on a number of retrieval measures. Show more

Keywords: Implicit entity linking, Semantic retrieval, DBpedia, Knowledge graph

DOI: 10.3233/AO-190215

Citation: Applied Ontology, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 451-477, 2019