4 November: DCLRS -- Friday, November 5 -- Tony Veale
Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar: Index of November 2004 | Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar - Index of year: 2004 | Full index
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Speaker: Dr. Tony Veale, UCD
venue: Davis Lecture Theatre (Arts Building Room 2043)
Trinity College, University of Dublin
time: 4:00-6:00, Friday, November 5, 2004
title:
WordNet Sits the S.A.T.: Pathways to Creativity in Lexical Ontologies
abstract:
Creativity is a vexing phenomenon to pin down formally, which is
perhaps why we tend to think of it in largely metaphoric terms. For
example, creativity is often conceived as a form of mental agility
that allows gifted individuals to make astonishing mental leaps from
one concept to another. Alternately, it is popularly conceived as a
form of lateral thinking that allows those who use it to insightfully
cut sideways through the hierarchical rigidity of conventional
categories. Common to most of these metaphors is the idea that
creativity involves recategorization, the ability to meaningfully move
a concept from one category to another in a way that unlocks hidden
value, perhaps by revealing a new and useful functional property of
the concept. For example, psychometric tests such as the Torrance test
of creative thinking try to measure this ability with tasks that,
e.g., ask a subject to list as many unusual and interesting uses of
old tin cans as possible. Likewise, SAT analogy tests often require
students to recognize functional or behavioral similarities between
concept pairs that display little or no superficial similarity.
Fortunately, lexicalized ontologies like WordNet that are rich with
instances of metaphor and polysemy are also rich in implicit evidence
of the conceptual innovations underlying creative thinking, both with
words and with artifacts. I show that by tapping into these
non-literal influences, WordNet's ontology can be made more conducive
to the development of creative thinking systems.
Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar - Index of November 2004 | Index of year: 2004 | Full index