Ontological Properties of Animals in a Children’s Dictionary With and Without Common-Sense Knowledge

Ontological Properties of Animals in a Children’s Dictionary With and Without Common-Sense Knowledge Julia M. Taylor (jtaylor@purdue.edu) Computer and Information Technology & CERIAS, Purdue University 401 N. Grant Street, W. Lafayette, IN 47907-2021 USA Victor Raskin (vraskin@purdue.edu) Linguistics & CERIAS, Purdue University 656 Oval Drive, W. Lafayette, IN 47907-2086 USA Christian F. Hempelmann (chempelm@purdue.edu) Linguistics and CERIAS, Purdue University 656 Oval Drive, W. Lafayette, IN 47907-2086 USA Abstract The paper applies a limited version of the resources of Ontological Semantic Technology to the descriptions of animals in the American Heritage First Dictionary and constructs a partial ontology from them. The explicitly mentioned properties in the descriptions are then supplemented by common-sense knowledge that the descriptions assume available to their young readership, and the output is compared to the previous one. The results, albeit modest, shed some interesting light on the most similar and dissimilar pairs of animals, as described in text. Keywords: common-sense knowledge; Ontological Semantic Technology; children’s dictionary; animal dataset; similarity. Introduction The paper explores the common-sense knowledge that is necessary to fully understand the definitions/descriptions (henceforth, just descriptions) of around 100 animals in the 2007 edition of the American Heritage First Dictionary (AHFD 2007) aimed at children in grades K-2 (ages 5-8). It does not address common-sense reasoning. The purpose is to get a grasp on how implicit information affects the structure of perceived knowledge, in this case of animal descriptions, and similarity among entities. The AHFD contains about 2,000 entries, claimed, almost entirely correctly, to be written with a controlled vocabulary so that that every description contains only words that also have entries in the dictionary. What is challenging in this design for our task is the possible implication of self- sufficiency, that is, of a much reduced dependency on the child’s knowledge of the world, unstated explicitly in the natural language descriptions but (unconsciously) assumed to be present for full comprehension. Most AFHD definitions for animals follow the “genus proximum, differentia specifica” format that is common for dictionaries, in particular for the classification of animal species: “Goldfish is a kind of fish [genus]. Goldfish are usually small and orange [differentia].” Apart from the differentiating specifics (small, orange) and the few properties that are specifics for the genus (in the AHFD, fish live in water, have tails, can swim well) and are thus inherited, the remaining knowledge necessary to understand such definitions remains implicit, because it is presumed to be common-sense of different kinds. There is, for example, no mention of a fish’s gills or fins. Capturing common-sense knowledge is a daunting task. We are assuming that descriptions of the (animal) world of this dictionary requires less common-sense knowledge simply because this world is more restricted than that of an adult and the dictionary was obviously designed to accommodate that. If that is so, then getting a grasp of that knowledge may be more feasible than in case of a common, unlimited, adult-level natural language communication 1 . The goal is, then, to illustrate how much information is lost when common-sense knowledge is not made explicit. Using the methods of computational semantics, specifically our Ontological Semantic Technology, we are taking advantage of the unique design of the dictionary to identify the required common-sense knowledge for a reasonably full comprehension of its animal descriptions. In this way, we aim to get a sense of its common-sense knowledge dependency. As a result, we also hope to clarify some issues concerning the very nature of common-sense knowledge and the feasibility of its computational acquisition and use, which is, as a matter of act, our primary and real concern. In Section 1, we introduce the notions of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ common-sense knowledge and explore its relation to underdetermination of reality by language and to saliency and, then, to ontology and natural language meaning, contingency, and instantiation.. In Section 2, we will briefly survey pertinent prior work. Section 3 will sketch out the Ontological Semantic Technology, our research tool as we applied it to the material. Section 4 compares the worldview on the animals that the descriptions define with the one complemented by the common-sense knowledge necessary to understand them. Section 5 discusses the results, The distinction between children as “novices” who know less about many domains than “expert” adults is well established (e.g., Carey 1985)-for better or worse.