Semantics of natural language descriptions of continuous quantities

Continuous quantities abound in the physical world. Properties in our environment, such as colour, shape, sound, texture, amongst many others, are routinely discussed. Yet natural languages are not adept at describing these continuous quantities precisely, nor are they easily incorporated into ontologies in the form of discrete terms. This book analyses the way that natural languages describe continuous quantities, proposes a general semantics based on metric spaces, and describes how to treat semantic values computationally, so that we may automate the processing of texts which describe continuous quantities. We investigate and show the validity of this approach by applying it to two different quantities: flower colour and leaf shape. We demonstrate how this facilitates the integration of multiple texts on the same topic. We provide a basis for incorporating these quantities into ontologies and applying automated reasoning to their semantics, thus permitting better recovery and ordering of responses to queries. This book shows the possibility and benefits of the collaboration of natural language semantic processing and formal knowledge representation.

Autorentext

Shenghui Wang received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Manchester in 2007. She has worked on various research projects ranging from natural language semantics, semantic interoperability in the Cultural Heritage domain, concept drift and multilevel dynamics in co-evolving communication networks.