A Context-Based Model for the Interpretation of Polysemous Terms

摘要

The problem of polysemy involves having terms, such as "truck", that refer to multiple concepts in different contexts; and con-versely, having the same concept referred to with different names in dif-ferent contexts. Contexts may be defined along different dimensions, such as language (Italian, English, French, ...), domain (Philosophy, Computer Science, Physics, ...), time (Ancient Greece, 20th century, ...) etc. Given a conceptual model M (aka ontology), a context C and a query Q we mo-tivate and propose algorithms for interpreting all the terms of the query with respect to M and C. We also define and solve the inverse problem: given a set of concepts S which are part of the answer to query Q and a context C, we propose algorithms for choosing terms for all the concepts in S. To illustrate the framework, we use a case study involving a history ontology whose elements are named differently depending on the time period and language of the query.