Title

The Rationale for Building an Ontology Expressly for NLP

Author(s)

Sergei Nirenburg, Marjorie McShane, Stephen Beale

Institute for Language and Information Technologies, University of Maryland Baltimore County

Session

O1-W

Abstract

In this paper we argue for the need of NLP-specific resources to support truly high level, semantically oriented applications. We describe what, in our experience, constitutes useful knowledge for such applications and why most extant resources are not sufficient for this purpose, leading our Ontological Semantics group to build its own. We suggest that extensive time and en-ergy are being spent on resources for NLP, though not on de-veloping ones of higher utility but, rather, on trying to discover ways of using less than ideal ones. We believe that a more use-ful long-term approach to the problem of knowledge acquisition for NLP would be to acquire what is needed from the outset, since it is likely that in the end such work will prove necessary anyway.

Keyword(s)

ontology, lexicon, NLP resources

Language(s) English
Full Paper

223.pdf