Saying is not modelling

Christophe Roche (1)

1 LISTIC - Laboratoire d'Informatique, Systèmes, Traitement de l'Information et de la Connaissance

In this article we claim that the conceptual modelling built from text is rarely an ontology. Such a conceptualization is corpus-dependent and does not offer the main properties we expect from ontology, e.g. reusability and soundness. Furthermore, ontology extracted from text in general does not match ontology defined by expert using a formal language. Such a result is not surprising since ontology is an extra-linguistic conceptualization whereas knowledge extracted from text is the concern of textual linguistics. Incompleteness of text and using rhetorical figures, like synecdoche, deeply modify the perception of the conceptualization we may have. It means that ontological knowledge, which is necessary for text understanding, is not in general embedded into documents. The article will end on some remarks about formal languages. If they allow to define " a specification of a conceptualization " they nevertheless raise their own issues mainly due to their epistemological neutrality. Ontology design remains an epistemological issue.

Mots clés: terminology; ontology; ontoterminology; ontology building; lexical semantics

Mots clés: terminologie; ontologie; ontoterminologie; construction d'ontologies; extraction de candidats termes; sémantique lexicale

Domaines: Linguistique; Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]

Christophe Roche. Saying is not modelling. 4th International Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Cognitive Science (NLPCS 2007) , Jun 2007, Funchal, Portugal. pp.47-56. ⟨hal-01354912⟩