Identity and Aboutness

On the Aboutness of UNL

This paper addresses the current status, the structure and role of the UNL Knowledge Base (UNLKB) in the UNL System. It is claimed that the UNLKB, understood as the repository where Universal Words (UWs) are named and defined, demands a thorough revision, in order to accomplish the self-consistency requirement of the Universal Networking Language (UNL). In order to emulate human cognition and c...

How Nonmonotonic Is Aboutness? How Nonmonotonic Is Aboutness?

The notion of aboutness is fundamental to information retrieval. Assume there is a document d which is about query q. Now, if information is added to d yielding ~ d, the question arises whether document ~ d is about q? In other words, is aboutness monotonic with respect to information composition? This article shows that aboutness does have nonmonotonic character with respect to composition.

Consciousness and the Varieties of Aboutness

Thinking is special. There is nothing quite like it. Thinking – judging, believing and inferring – occurs in the natural order; but, at least sometimes, it seems hard to accept that there could be a fully satisfying reconstruction of thought in the terms favoured by the natural sciences – particularly, the physical and biological sciences (Davies, 1990). Some of our intuitions about thought are...

Conceptual Graph Aboutness

In this paper we present an information retrieval model based on conceptual graphs named ELEN [1]. In ELEN a conceptual graph is a representative of the information inherent in the document and query. Graph operators can be used to determine whether a graph is a generalisation of another graph, in which case the information carried by the graph is said to be about the information carried by the...

Fundamental Properties of Aboutness