Ontological Semantics: An Overview

Explore a comprehensive overview of Ontological Semantics in this 1 hour 15 minute lecture by Sergei Nirenburg from the Center for Language & Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University. Delve into a systematic approach to treating text meaning through computer processing, emphasizing the crucial role of meaning in natural language processing (NLP) applications. Discover how Ontological Semantics integrates various theories, methodologies, descriptions, and implementations to represent and manipulate meaning in computer programs. Learn about the coordinated "microtheories" covering diverse areas such as language phenomena, processing heuristics, and implementation system architecture. Understand the evolving nature of Ontological Semantics, driven by the need to improve text analysis and generation tasks. Examine the heterogeneous methods developed for specific tasks and their coordination at knowledge acquisition and runtime system architecture levels. Gain insights into the relationship between Ontological Semantics and other fields, including cognitive science, AI, philosophy of science, linguistic semantics, computational lexical semantics, and formal ontology. Explore the content of Ontological Semantics, including text-meaning representation, static knowledge sources (ontology, fact repository, and lexicon), text analysis processes, and static knowledge acquisition.