The Semantics of Relationships

The genesis of this volume was the participation of the editors in an ACMlSIGIR (Association for Computing Machinery/Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval) workshop entitled "Beyond Word Relations" (Hetzler, 1997). This workshop examined a number of relationship types with significance for information retrieval beyond the conventional topic-matching relationship. From this shared participation came the idea for an edited volume on relationships, with chapters to be solicited from researchers and practitioners throughout the world. Ultimately, one volume became two volumes. The first volume, Relationships in the Organization of Knowledge (Bean & Green, 200 I), examines the role of relationships in knowledge organization theory and practice, with emphasis given to thesaural relationships and integration across systems, languages, cultures, and disciplines. This second volume examines relationships in a broader array of contexts. The two volumes should be seen as companions, each informing the other. As with the companion volume, we are especially grateful to the authors who willingly accepted challenges of space and time to produce chapters that summarize extensive bodies of research. The value of the volume clearly resides in the quality of the individual chapters. In naming this volume The Semantics of Relationships: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, we wanted to highlight the fact that relationships are not just empty connectives. Relationships constitute important conceptual units and make significant contributions to meaning.

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Work on relationships takes place in many communities, including data modeling, knowledge representation, natural language processing, linguistics, and information retrieval. Unfortunately, continued disciplinary splintering and specialization keeps any one person from being familiar with the full expanse of that work. By including contributions from experts (Cruse; Fellbaum; Evens; Green; Guarino and Welty; Hetzler; Hovy; Jouis; Khoo and Myaeng; Khoo, Chan and Niu; McCray and Bodenreider; Pribbenow) in a variety of disciplines and backgrounds, this volume demonstrates both the parallels that inform work on relationships across a number of fields and the singular emphases that have yet to be fully embraced. The volume is organized into three parts: The first explores types of relationships; the second delves into the role of relationships in knowledge representation and reasoning; the third presents applications that make central use of relationships.

Contenu
I Types of Relationships.- 1 Hyponymy and Its Varieties.- 2 On the Semantics of Troponymy.- 3 Meronymic Relationships: From Classical Mereology to Complex Part-Whole Relations.- 4 The Many Facets of the Cause-Effect Relation.- II Relationships in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning.- 5 Internally-Structured Conceptual Models in Cognitive Semantics.- 6 Comparing Sets of Semantic Relations in Ontologies.- 7 Identity and Subsumption.- 8 Logic of Relationships.- III Applications of Relationships.- 9 Thesaural Relations in Information Retrieval.- 10 Identifying Semantic Relations in Text for Information Retrieval and Information Extraction.- 11 A Conceptual Framework for the Biomedical Domain.- 12 Visual Analysis and Exploration of Relationships.