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IAF Calls & Action Lines
Inducing Semantics from Structures
(Paolo Avesani, ITC-IRST)
Our claim is that a new communication protocol could be enabled that is in between a collection of keywords, where terms are not related, and a sentence, where terms are organized in a sequence determined by the rules of natural language. XML documents represent an evidence of how such a kind of communication protocol is spreading.
Consider the scenario where the structured terms represent a web site hierarchy. The term _home_ could refer to different meanings: the concept of homepage of the web site, or the personal address of people. We could also represent this kind of information as an XML document where tags are the terms used to refer to the main entry point of a web site, and the structure is derived from the links between URIs. The right meaning of the term _home_ will we disambiguated taking into account the related position in the structure: a very narrow position to the root will favor the interpretation of _homepage_, while if neighbouring terms are related to _address_ or _office_ the interpretation of _domestic location_ is preferred.
Though the example is really simple, what we would like to stress is that the disambiguation process can detect the right interpretations as the result of a learning effort.
- Presentation slides
- e-mail: avesani@irst.itc.it
- URL: http://sra.itc.it/
- Other contacts: P. Bouquet(University of Trento, http://www.cs.unitn.it ), R. Rizzi(ITC-IRST)