Corega Tabs: Mapping Semantics onto Pragmatics

In this paper, we outline our approach to mapping domain independent semantic representations to extensional statement specific to a given application. Fur this purpose, we exploit the equivalence between Discourse Representation Structures limited to the expressiveness of ALC and ABoxes for validating DRS with respect to a given knowledge base and explain how task independent semantics representations can be specialized to a domain specific meaning. The paper concludes with some performance results and remarks on desirable features of DL reasoners not implemented up to now. 1 DL Models of Applications Applications are characterized by a DL terminology which models the concepts used for making propositions about application situations. In [BLG02] it is explained, how domain independent semantic representations for a certain class of natural language phrases can be composed relying on EuroWordNet (EWN) [Vos98] as a linguistic ontology. The remaining question is, how these representations can be mapped onto ABoxes only containing propositions in a application specific ontology (sec. 2). As a prerequisite, we address the issue of how those two ontologies can be linked to form a modular DL knowledge base composed of several smaller parts for covering special purpose ontologies (sec. 4). Basically, the knowledge base is composed of two parts. The EWN ontology encodes the linguistic meaning of words determined on an empirical basis, whereas the Standard Upper Ontology (SUMO) [NP01] is used as a generic base model for concepts of the application domain. See section 2 for a description of how we use the knowledge base. We present our experiments with Racer in section 3. The modular composition of T-Boxes is topic of section 4, and section 5 gives an overview about further requirements of A-Box reasoning.