I UNL Panel

Tuesday, 06 November 2012 11:54 Ronaldo Martins
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December 15, 2012 - Mumbai, India (associated event to COLING 2012)

The main purpose of the UNL Panel is to collect the opinion of specialists, from inside and outside the UNL Community, about technical issues of UNL, in order to prepare the ground for an in-depth revision of the current UNL specifications. The I UNL Panel, an associated event to COLING 2012, is devoted to the nature and role of Universal Words (UW's), the nodes in the UNL semantic graph.

Rationale

The UNL is an artificial language created to represent and process information across language barriers. Initially proposed by the Institute of Advanced Studies of the United Nations University, in Tokyo, Japan, in 1996, it has been enhanced and promoted by the UNDL Foundation, in Geneva, Switzerland, under a mandate of the United Nations, since 2000. The basic assumption of the UNL approach is that the information conveyed by natural languages can be formally represented through a semantic network made of three different types of discrete semantic units: Universal Words (UW's), relations and attributes. The UW's are the nodes in the graph, to be interlinked by relations and specified by attributes.

As the name indicates, Universal Words are expected to be "universal". This does not mean that they represent a sort of common lexical denominator to all languages or a semantic primitive. The concept of universality, in UNL, must be understood in terms of "semantic accessibility", i.e, in the sense of "capable of being used and understood by all" (as in "universal adapter", "universal screwdriver" or "universal remote control"), and UW's depict concepts that may range from absolutely global to absolutely local, and even temporary. They are universal in the sense that they are uniform identifiers to the entities defined in the UNL Knowledge Base, which is expected to map everything that we know about the world, and that is used to assign translatability to any concept.

In order to take the best directions concerning the UW's, the UNDL Foundation will listen to 6 specialists about 5 topics of lexical semantics:

These topics will be discussed considering the five practical questions available at www.unlweb.net/wiki/I_UNL_Panel. The panelists are expected to discuss which answers would be more appropriate and feasible for each question, considering the nature and role of UNL, and the state of the art of the theory and technology on natural language processing.

Panelists

Chair

Ronaldo Martins (UNDL Foundation)

Program

Saturday, December 15, 2012

Venue

Victor Menezes Convention Center - IIT Bombay

Further information

Ronaldo Martins ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )

Last Updated on Saturday, 17 November 2012 15:26