Generalized Semantic Schemas and Arguments to Use These Structures

The concept of semantic schema (or θ-schema) is an abstract structure and can be used to represent knowledge. As defined in [9], this structure uses one operator symbol denoted by θ. In this paper we present the following concepts and results: we introduce the concept of Θ-schema (or generalized semantic schema), where Θ = {θ1, . . . , θn} is a finite set of operator symbols, by extending the concept of θ-schema; we redefine the concept of formal derivation (or formal computation) in this structure; we define also the semantic computations in a generalized semantic schema. In a separate section we present two arguments to use generalized semantic schemas: we can define multiple meanings for a given arc and we can embed two or more semantic schemas into a generalized semantic schema. By these mechanisms we can increase the generative power of the deductions in a semantic schema. The last section includes the main ideas that can be used to obtain a distributed schema by means of the concept of generalized schema. Several open problems are also discussed.