Constructing an Ontology of Coherence Relations: An example of ‘causal relation’

Constructing an Ontology of Coherence Relations: An example of ‘causal relation’* Hae-Yun Lee and Sueun Jun Dept. of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, Hankuk Univ. of Foreign Studies, Korea haeyun@hufs.ac.kr, kazoopablo@hotmail.com Abstract. The goal of this paper is to present the methodology of constructing a language ontology of ‘coherent relations’. We construct an ontology of more abstract concepts by combining an upper-level ontology and a middle-level ontology. At the former we use theoretical considerations following Sanders et al. (1992, 1993), and at the latter we use lexical items through the substitutability test of Knott and Dale (1994). Keywords: ontology, coherence relations, connectives 1. Introduction 1.1.Ontology ‘Ontology’ has recently become one of the most attractive research areas. Even though the notion originates from philosophy, there have been many researches within AI or Computer Science. Ontology is usually defined as “an explicit specification of a conceptualization,” where a “conceptualization is an abstract, simplified view of the world that we wish to represent for some purpose” (Gruber 1993: 199). But many constructed ontologies are not consistent, because the conceptualization is different according to the interests of researchers. Therefore most ontologists make use of languages which are considered to reflect the objects of conceptualization objectively. If we consider that an element of conceptualization is a concept, it is followed that the notion of ontology is related closely with languages. As we know, the modern linguistics is based on the ‘meaning triangle’ (Ogden and Richards 1923). At the triangle, the connection of a symbol with an object is mediated by a concept, and each element constructs its own system. So the system of symbols, i.e. a network of words, is similar to the system of concepts, i.e. an ontology. Therefore we can assume, that an ontology can be constructed indirectly by means of words. The network of words is often called ‘Language Ontology’. Nickles et al. (2007) considers Language Ontology as an answer to the following question: “What kinds of things do people talk as if there are?” Further the notion of Language Ontology is defined as “a conceptualization or categorization of what normal everyday human language can talk about” (Zaefferer 2002). * Copyright 2008 by Hae-Yun Lee and Sueun Jun 245 22nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, pages 245–252 1.2. Goals The goal of this paper is to present the methodology of constructing the language ontology about ‘coherent relations’. Some previous language ontologies such as WordNet, etc. have been restricted to the lexical categories such as nouns, verbs, adjective, and adverbs. There were no ontologies about abstract notions such as coherent relations which are realized mostly as minor categories such as suffixes or connectives. For the construction of ontology of coherent relations, we will adopt the following strategy: At the upper-level, we will construct the ontology in a top-down manner, reflecting the theoretical considerations which are relatively language-independent. But at the middle-level, we will proceed with the work in a bottom-up manner. That is we will construct the middle part of the …

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