I UNL Panel

Revision as of 23:00, 14 September 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 the UNL, as to prepare the ground for an in-depth revision of the specifications. The I UNL Panel, which has been proposed as an associated event to COLING'2012, is devoted to the set, the notation and the properties of UW's.

Structure

In order to take the best directions concerning the nature and the role of the UW's, the UNDL Foundation will listen to 6 specialists, from inside and outside the UNL Community, about the 5 questions below. These questions illustrate some theoretical and practical issues concerning UW's and have been receiveing several different possible answers. The main goal of I UNL Panel is to discuss which answers would be more appropriate and feasible, considering the nature and role of the UNL, and the state of the art of the theory and technology on natural language processing. Participants are expected to use them as starting points for their presentations, but we would expect them to suggest some general procedures to be adopted in similar cases, which could either confirm or deny our current practices, defined in the section UW's, and which have been object of revision. Participants must understand, however, that only the structure of UNL is under discussion. The commitments, assumptions and properties of the UNL, which are the keystones of the language and are presented in the Introduction to UNL, should be taken for granted, and must be used as the general framework for all the answers. The specialists are requested to explain their positions both in a paper in a question-answer format (to be published at the UNLweb) and in a 30-minute oral presentation (to be delivered during the meeting). The oral presentations will be followed by a discussion session, according to the tentative program below.

Program (tentative)

Saturday, December 15^th, 2012

• 09:00-09:30 - Opening session
• 09:30-10:00 - General presentation of the questions
• 10:00-10:30 - First presentation
• 10:30-11:00 - Coffee-break
• 11:00-11:30 - Second presentation
• 11:30-12:00 - Third presentation
• 12:00-14:00 - Lunch break
• 14:00-14:30 - Fourth presentation
• 14:30-15:00 - Fifth presentation
• 15:00-15:30 - Sixth presentation
• 15:30-16:00 - Coffee-break
• 16:00-17:30 - Discussion session
• 17:30-18:00 - Closing session

Issues

Considering the commitments, assumptions and properties of the UNL, defined in Introduction to UNL, and
considering the state of the art of the theory and technology on natural language processing,
Which would be the more appropriate and feasible answer to the questions below?

1) How many UWs should be recognized in the sentence "Charles Dickens is generally regarded as the most important English novelist of the Victorian period"?

The basic assumption of the UNL approach is that the information conveyed by natural languages can be formally and usefully represented through semantic networks composed of three different types of discrete semantic entities: Universal Words (UW's), relations and attributes. Universal Words are nodes in the UNL graph; relations are arcs between nodes; and attributes are specifiers that restrict the extension of nodes. This three-layered representation is the cornerstone of the UNL and poses several problems to the UNLization as the distinction between these three entities is not always clear. Consider, for instance, the sentence above. How many UWs (either permanent or temporary) should be recognized in this sentence?

• "Charles Dickens" should be represented as single UW ("Charles Dickens") or as two different UW's ("Charles", "Dickens")? What about "Victorian period"? Should it be represented as "Victorian period" or as "Victorian" and "period"?
• The verb "to be" should be represented as a UW or as a relation between "Charles Dickens" and "the most important English novelist of the Victorian period"? (Consider also the options "was" and "has been" in the same context)
• The preposition "of" should be represented as a UW or as a relation between "the most important novelist" and "the Victorian period"? (Consider also the options "since", "from ... on", "in" or "during" instead of "of")
• "generally regarded as" should be represented by UW's ("generally", "regarded", "as", for instance) or as an attribute (a downtoner, which lowers the truth effect of the declaration) to be assigned to the whole proposition "Charles Dickens is the most important English novelist of the Victorian period"?
• The adverb "most" should be represented as a UW or as a superlative marker (to be represented as an attribute to be assigned to the adjective "important"?) (Consider also "greatest English novelist" instead of "most important English novelist")