What's in a semantic network?

James F. Allen, Alan M. Frisch
1982 Proceedings of the 20th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics -  
Ever since Woods's "What's in a Link" paper, there has been a growing concern for formalization in the study of knowledge representation. Several arguments have been made that frame representation languages and semantic-network languages are syntactic variants of the ftrst-order predicate calculus (FOPC). The typical argument proceeds by showing how any given frame or network representation can be mapped to a logically isomorphic FOPC representation. For the past two years we have been studying
more » ... the formalization of knowledge retrievers as well as the representation languages that they operate on. This paper presents a representation language in the notation of FOPC whose form facilitates the design of a semantic-network-like retriever. We have demonstrated elsewhere [Frisch and Allen, 1982 ] the utility of viewing a knowledge retriever as a specialized inference engine (theorem prover). A specialized inference engine is tailored to treat certain predicate, function, and constant symbols differently than others. This is done by building into the inference engine certain true sentences involving these symbols 19
doi:10.3115/981251.981256 dblp:conf/acl/AllenF82 fatcat:ntojbsfv6jbvpaw2gq2uljyhom