Making Lexical Ontologies Functional and Context-Sensitive

Human categorization is neither a binary nor a context-free process. Rather, some concepts are better examples of a category than others, while the criteria for category membership may be satisfied to different degrees by different concepts in different contexts. In light of these empirical facts, WordNet’s static category structure appears both excessively rigid and unduly fragile for processing real texts. In this paper we describe a syntagmatic, corpus-based approach to redefining WordNet’s categories in a functional, gradable and context-sensitive fashion. We describe how the diagnostic properties for these definitions are automatically acquired from the web, and how the increased flexibility in categorization that arises from these redefinitions offers a robust account of metaphor comprehension in the mold of Glucksberg’s (2001) theory of category-inclusion. Furthermore, we demonstrate how this competence with figurative categorization can effectively be governed by automatically-generated ontological constraints, also acquired from the web.