hakia Invites You to Play With Our Semantic Resources

When I first heard the term ontological semantics (OntoSem) as a doctoral student of linguistics some ten years ago, I went for cover. My main research interest at the time was the linguistics, more specifically semantics, of humor. But my mentor suggested to expand my research interest to cover semantics in general, and to combine this with my interest in computers and do research in formal theories of semantics. After all, there aren’t many tenure-track professorships for linguists who apply their research to humor.

My rite of passage into the world of OntoSem was reading the relatively advanced draft of Nirenburg and Raskin’s monograph on the subject. About five times. It struck me as a daring and encompassing approach, and I definitely wanted to help develop it. After I worked in OntoSem research for many years, applied it in many different domains, including humor, my current position is the specific challenge to implement it for internet search at hakia.com.

Luckily, hakia users don’t have to sweat through 400 pages to get relevant search results. But to understand the theory and technology that is now being introduced in the online beta of hakia to help produce these results based on meaning, a look at www.ontologicalsemantics.com will be instructive. On this site, my mentor, Victor Raskin , has assembled links to much of the existing research in OntoSem, including an introduction that will whet your appetite for the research papers and, possibly even the book, a prepublication draft of which is available there. You will want to read it about five times, I suggest.

Or you can take a look at our OntoSem resources at the hakia lab. You can do lookups in our constantly improving lexicon and see how the meaning of a word is expressed through ontological concepts. Further developments in OntoSem are taking place behind the scenes at hakia all the time. So I’ll now return to working on the chapters of the next OntoSem book, based on our implementation of it in search. Expect them to appear on www.ontologicalsemantics.com soon. You know how many times you should read them, right?

        

This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 12:43 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.