A Language for Ontological Nihilism

Ontological Reasoning for Natural Language Understanding

This thesis presents OntoNat, a prototypical system for answering Yes/No-questions on natural language sentences. Different from existing systems, OntoNat uses background knowledge from the Suggested Upper Model Ontology (SUMO)[NP01], so that it can perform some kind of common sense reasoning to answer a question. SUMO is translated to a disjunctive logic program (DLP). The input sentence and t...

Towards an Ontological Language for Game Analysis

The Game Ontology Project (GOP) is creating a framework for describing, analyzing and studying games, by defining a hierarchy of concepts abstracted from an analysis of many specific games. GOP borrows concepts and methods from prototype theory as well as grounded theory to achieve a framework that is always growing and changing as new games are analyzed or particular research questions are exp...

Ontological Symmetry in Language: A Brief Manifesto

In the tradition of quantified modal logic, it was assumed that significantly different linguistic systems underlie reference to individuals, to times and to 'possible worlds'. Various results from recent research in formal semantics suggest that this is not so, and that there is in fact a pervasive symmetry between the linguistic means with which we refer to these three domains. Reference to i...

Language Understanding With Ontological Semantics

Ontological Semantics is an approach to automatically extracting the meaning of natural language texts. The OntoSem text analysis system, developed according to this approach, generates ontologically grounded, disambiguated text meaning representations that can serve as input to intelligent agent reasoning. This article focuses on two core subtasks of overall semantic analysis: lexical disambig...

Logical Nihilism