A linguistic ontology

This paper defends the choice of a linguistically-based content ontology for natural language processing and demonstrates that a single common-sense ontology produces plausible interpretations at all levels from parsing through reasoning. The paper explores some of the problems and tradeoffs for a method which has just one content ontology. A linguistically-based content ontology represents the ''world view'' encoded in natural language. The content ontology (as opposed to the formal semantic ontology which distinguishes events from propositions, and so on) is best grounded in the culture, rather than in the world itself, or in the mind. By ''world view'' we mean naive assumptions about ''what there is'' in the world, and how it should be classified. These assumptions are time-worn and reflected in language at several levels: morphology, syntax and lexical semantics. The content ontology presented in the paper is part of a Naive Semantic lexicon. Naive Semantics is a lexical theory in which associated with each word sense is a naive theory (or set of beliefs) about the objects or events of reference. While naive semantic representations are not combinations of a closed set of primitives, they are also limited by a shallowness assumption. Included is just the information required to form a semantic interpretation incrementally, not all of the information known about objects. The Naive Semantic ontology is based upon a particular language, its syntax and its word senses. To the extent that other languages codify similar world views, we predict that their ontologies are similar. Applied in a computational natural language understanding system, this linguistically-motivated ontology (along with other native semantic information) is sufficient to disambiguate words, disambiguate syntactic structure, disambiguate formal semantic representations, resolve anaphoric expressions and perform reasoning tasks with text. (C) 1995 Academic Press Limited