OpenWIMs: Setting Up A New Knowledge Acquisition Platform For Semantic Analysis Of Text - semanticweb.com

" ... OpenWIMS explains itself as an organization for defining standards in semantic text processing, and an open source implementation of a semantic analyzer, whose output is a collection of WIMs. The system, it further explains, is a semantic text analysis engine that lives on a syntactic­ semantic lexicon and expects as input a set of syntactic dependencies for the target text. 'The system takes natural language text and does its best to pull that text down to machine-tractable meaning representations that can then be auto-reasoned upon by computerized agents, and made available for data mining,' says Benjamin Johnson, one of the three people behind the emerging organization. 'It’s how to get free-form text into something very well-defined and structured and that can be reasoned upon.' As he notes, disambiguation is the big bugaboo in processing text automatically – Mary may have had a little lamb, but does that mean she is a little girl with a pet sheep, a young lady who ate lamb chops for dinner, or a newly minted mother ewe? 'These are radically different interpretations of this same string of text, so you need to know which is correct or you are apt to make errors if you get it wrong,' he says. A 70 or 80 percent accuracy has been the norm, but it can get better with knowledge-based methods like the organization’s own approach to semantic analysis, Johnson says. It won’t happen, however, unless you can penetrate the knowledge acquisition bottleneck. And the project seeks to overcome that by providing a community-­driven, moderated and open knowledge base designed specifically for use in textual semantic analysis, including word sense disambiguation, semantic relation detection and so on ..."