On moving on on ontologies: mass, count and long thin things

• Authors: Robin P. Fawcett
• Venue: INLG '94 Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Natural Language Generation
• Year: 1994

This paper discusses the principles that should govern the construction of two components of a system for natural language generation (NLG): (1) the ontology - or, rather, as the paper argues, the 'ontological' aspects of a belief system - and (2) the semantic representation of noun senses. It is an interesting fact that many ontologies bear a striking resemblance to a system network, as used in systemic functional grammar (SFG). Furthermore, two major current research efforts in the field of ontology-building are designed to run with a SFG generator: Pangloss, where the generator is Penman, and COMMUNAL, where the generator is GENESYS. It is therefore important to establish a principled approach to the 'division of labour' between the ontology and the equivalent aspects of the model of language - here a system network for the 'meaning potential' of English nouns. (However, the general principles should be relevant to ANY model of language.) The paper summarises (a) the purposes and (b) the structure of (1) a system network for noun senses and (2) the equivalent ontology (based on what we in the COMMUNAL Project judge is required in the next generation of belief systems for NLG). Examples are given of current work on the relevant system network and, more briefly, of the equivalent ontological aspects of the belief system. In particular, reasons are given why it would be inappropriate to give a primary place to the 'mass' vs. 'count' distinction in an 'interlingua' ontology - and even, surprising though it may seem, in a language-specific semantics for English. Finally, it turns out that, in the new perspective presented here, there is no 'component' of the belief system that is 'the ontology', and the reasons for this apparently anomalous position are given.