This paper describes the initial results of an experiment in integrating knowledge-based text processing with real-world reasoning in a question answering system. Our MOQA “meaning-oriented question answering” system seeks answers to questions not in open text but rather in a structured fact repository whose elements are instances of ontological concepts extracted from the text meaning represen...

the nocturnal harmony of wood orchestra, reza ghassemi’s first novel, is a rare example of iranian postmodernist novel. though the novel has a complicated structure, it is still well-crafted, readable and pleasing, a virtue that very often is not observed in persian postmodernist novels. the present study analyzes the novel in the light of such terms as metafiction, ontological ambiguity, short...

The objective of this paper is to present a method to automatically enrich WordNet with sub-trees of concepts in a given language domain. WordNet is then trimmed to reduce unnecessary ambiguity and singleton nodes. The process is based on the use of statistical method and linguistic processing to extract candidate domain terms. Multiword terms are semantically disambiguated and interpreted usin...

Probabilistic forecasting models describe the aleatory variability of natural systems as well as our epistemic uncertainty about how the systems work. Testing a model against observations exposes ontological errors in the representation of a system and its uncertainties. We clarify several conceptual issues regarding the testing of probabilistic forecasting models for ontological errors: the am...

We present an ontological approach to the design of the student model for a tutorial agent system (TAS). Our model emphasizes the classification and detection of error types. If the student has any systematic and predictable misconceptions, the system attempts to determine the underlying reasons for such errors. We adopt the “Identification, Simulation, Interaction, and Mapping” (ISIM) strategy...

As is clear in the 2008 report of the President's Council on Bioethics, the brain death debate is plagued by ambiguity in the use of such key terms as 'integration' and 'wholeness'. Addressing this problem, I offer a plausible ontological account of organismal unity drawing on the work of Hoffman and Rosenkrantz, and then apply that account to the case of brain death, concluding that a brain de...