New research directions for data and knowledge engineering: A philosophy of language approach

This article advances a strategic proposal that would enable future research in data/knowledge engineering and natural language processing to take a broader range of meanings into account than can be derived from analyzing text with current methods focusing on syntactic and semantic text meanings. It advocates drawing on the knowledge and common sense meanings that users acquire from NL interactions in their lifeworld, i.e. the ‘life-meanings’ that are created and shared in social communities. Three philosophical language perspectives are described to derive a research program for incorporating life-meaning based methods into contemporary DKE/NLP research. 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.