Theory of K-Calculuses as a Powerful and Flexible Mathematical Framework for Building Ontologies and Designing Natural Language Processing Systems

摘要

The necessity of developing more powerful and convenient formal means (in comparison with the widely used ones) for describing structured meanings of natural language (NL) texts and building ontologies is grounded. The basic principles of an original mathematical approach to this problem are outlined; this approach is given by the the theory of K-calculuses and K-languages (the KCL-theory) elaborated by the author. The considered examples of building semantic representations of the NL-texts, of constructing definitions of concepts, and of finding an answer to a question of the end user pertain to biology, medicine, ecology, and business. The advantages of the KCL-theory in comparison with Discourse Representation Theory, Theory of Conceptual Graphs, and Episodic Logic are stated. It is reported about a number of successful applications of the KCL-theory to the design of NL-processing systems. The metaphor "a kitchen combine" is used for underlining that the KCL-theory provides a broad spectrum of new opportunities for the design of NL-processing systems and building ontologies.