Brown Bag Speaker: Sergei Nirenburg

The Applied Psychology Unit at Arizona State University's Polytechnic campus is pleased to announce a colloquium:

Ontological Semantics: An Overview

Sergei Nirenburg

The term ontological semantics refers to the apparatus of describing and manipulating meaning in natural language texts. Basic ontological-semantic analyzers take natural language texts as inputs and generate machine-tractable text meaning representations (TMRs) that form the basis of various reasoning processes. Ontological-semantic text generators take TMRs as inputs and produce natural language texts. Ontological-semantic systems centrally rely on extensive static knowledge resources:

• a language-independent ontology, the model of the world that includes models of intelligent agents;
• ontology-oriented lexicons (and onomasticons, or lexicons of proper names) for each natural language in the system; and
• a fact repository consisting of instances of ontological concepts as well as remembered text meaning representations.

Applications of ontological semantics include knowledge-based machine translation, information retrieval and extraction, text summarization, ontological support for reasoning systems, including networks of human and software agents, general knowledge management and others. In this talk I will give an overview of ontological-semantic processing and static resources and discuss its its use in question answering and machine translation.

Thursday, December 11, 2003

12 O’Clock Noon

Sutton 301 (3^rd Floor Conference Room)