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Abstract

This chapter examines the nature of semantic relations and their main applications in information science. The nature and types of semantic relations are discussed from the perspectives of linguistics and psychology. An overview of the semantic relations used in knowledge structures such as thesauri and ontologies is provided, as well as the main techniques used in the automatic extraction of semantic relations from text. The chapter then reviews the use of semantic relations in information extraction, information retrieval, question-answering, and automatic text summarization applications. Concepts and relations are the foundation of knowledge and thought. When we look at the world, we perceive not a mass of colors but objects to which we automatically assign category labels. Our perceptual system automatically segments the world into concepts and categories. Concepts are the building blocks of knowledge; relations act as the cement that links concepts into knowledge structures. We spend much of our lives identifying regular associations and relations between objects, events, and processes so that the world has an understandable structure and predictability. Our lives and work depend on the accuracy and richness of this knowledge structure and its web of relations. Relations are needed for reasoning and inferencing. Chaffin and Herrmann (1988b, p. 290) noted that "relations between ideas have long been viewed as basic to thought, language, comprehension, and memory." Aristotle's Metaphysics (Aristotle, 1961; McKeon, expounded on several types of relations. The majority of the 30 entries in a section of the Metaphysics known today as the Philosophical Lexicon referred to relations and attributes, including cause, part-whole, same and opposite, quality (i.e., attribute) and kind-of, and defined different types of each relation. Hume (1955) pointed out that there is a connection between successive ideas in our minds, even in our dreams, and that the introduction of an idea in our mind automatically recalls an associated idea. He argued that all the objects of human reasoning are divided into relations of ideas and matters of fact and that factual reasoning is founded on the cause-effect relation. His Treatise of Human Nature identified seven kinds of relations: resemblance, identity, relations of time and place, proportion in quantity or number, degrees in quality, contrariety, and causation. Mill (1974, pp. 989-1004) discoursed on several types of relations, claiming that all things are either feelings, substances, or attributes, and that attributes can be a quality (which belongs to one object) or a relation to other objects.
Linguists in the structuralist tradition (e.g., Lyons, 1977; Saussure, 1959) have asserted that concepts cannot be defined on their own but only in relation to other concepts. Semantic relations appear to reflect a logical structure in the fundamental nature of thought (Caplan & Herrmann, 1993). Green, Bean, and Myaeng (2002) noted that semantic relations play a critical role in how we represent knowledge psychologically, linguistically, and computationally, and that many systems of knowledge representation start with a basic distinction between entities and relations. Green (2001, p. 3) said that "relationships are involved as we combine simple entities to form more complex entities, as we compare entities, as we group entities, as one entity performs a process on another entity, and so forth. Indeed, many things that we might initially regard as basic and elemental are revealed upon further examination to involve internal structure, or in other words, internal relationships." Concepts and relations are often expressed in language and text. Language is used not just for communicating concepts and relations, but also for representing, storing, and reasoning with concepts and relations. We shall examine the nature of semantic relations from a linguistic and psychological perspective, with an emphasis on relations expressed in text. The usefulness of semantic relations in information science, especially in ontology construction, information extraction, information retrieval, question-answering, and text summarization is discussed. Research and development in information science have focused on concepts and terms, but the focus will increasingly shift to the identification, processing, and management of relations to achieve greater effectiveness and refinement in information science techniques. Previous chapters in ARIST on natural language processing (Chowdhury, 2003), text mining (Trybula, 1999), information retrieval and the philosophy of language (Blair, 2003), and query expansion (Efthimiadis, 1996) provide a background for this discussion, as semantic relations are an important part of these applications.

Source

Annual review of information science and technology. 40(2006), S.157-228