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Victor Raskin AI simulator
(@Victor Raskin_simulator)
Hub AI
Victor Raskin AI simulator
(@Victor Raskin_simulator)
Victor Raskin
Victor Raskin (born April 17, 1944) is a distinguished professor of linguistics at Purdue University. He is the author of Semantic Mechanisms of Humor (1985) and Ontological Semantics (2004) with Sergei Nirenburg and served as the founding editor of Humor, the journal for the International Society for Humor Studies.
Victor Raskin was born in Irbit, USSR (now Russian Federation) in 1944. He obtained a doctorate in linguistics from Moscow State University in 1970. He has been married to Marina Bergelson since 1965; his daughter Sarah was born in 1982. He and his wife emigrated from the U.S.S.R. to Israel in 1973, and have been Israeli citizens since 1973. They moved to the United States in 1978, became permanent residents of the United States in 1979, and became U.S. citizens in 1984.[citation needed]
At Purdue University, Raskin was a professor in the Department of English and the Department of Linguistics. He is also a founding faculty member and associate director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS). He retired in 2023.
This approach to linguistic meaning differs significantly from truth-conditional/model-theoretic semantics in that it is focused on the meaning of the lexical items as well as on their syntactic relations, rather than on whether the sentences are true or false. Meaning is characterized as a semantic graph (network) consisting of edges (labeled links, such as hyponym, hyperonym, part-of, agent, etc.) and of vertices or nodes (i.e., the scripts). Thus for example, the script for APPLE would be connected by a link labeled ISA (a.k.a, hyperonym) connecting to the script for FRUIT and by various part-of links to other scripts such as PEEL, SEEDS, CORE, FLESH, STEM, etc. Hence the meaning of the word apple is given by the set of links of the script APPLE.
The meaning of a sentence is determined through a process of disambiguation, in which for example the other meanings of “apple” are discarded by contextual pressure (so the sense of “apple” as the computer company is discarded if the sentence reads “the child ate an apple.” However, script-based semantics which many aspects of meaning that are usually seen as part of pragmatics (for example, implicatures, goals, etc.).
Semantic scripts theory is closely related to frame semantics and schema theory and in fact shares their origins in psychology (Bartlett's schemata) and in the work on Artificial Intelligence in the 1970s (what is now known as Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence). Script-based semantics evolved in a computational direction in the 1990s and became ontological semantics.
Raskin's work in ontological semantics takes place in the context of machine translation. Raskin was one of the early proponents of ontological semantics (Raskin 1990; Nirenburg et al. 1995; Nirenburg and Raskin 2004). In ontological semantics, the ontology, i.e., the hierarchical tree of the ISA links is taken to define the semantic domain. This language independent structure is then mapped onto each individual language. This allows translation from any language into any other language using two dictionaries (for example, in the case of English to Chinese translation all that is needed is an English to ontology mapping and a Chinese to ontology mapping). The advantage of this approach appears when translation is needed between more than two languages. If translating between English, Chinese, Russian and Arabic, one needs English-Chinese, English-Arabic, and English-Russian mappings, but also Chinese-Arabic, Chinese-Russian, and Arabic-Russian mappings (in other words, (n -1)! mappings) whereas one needs only n language to ontology mappings.
Ontological semantics inherits the foundations and all the complex theoretical apparatus of script-based semantics and advances a set of micro-theories (aspect, tense, adjectives, etc.) that cover specific sub-areas of interest in semantics. Given that it is dedicated to actual translation it also incorporates an onomasticon (list of proper names) and a fact database. Procedurally, ontological semantics translates a given text into a Text-Meaning Representation (TMR) which is language independent and consist of items in the ontology and specifies their relations (for example Mary is the AGENT and the “ball” is the PATIENT).
Victor Raskin
Victor Raskin (born April 17, 1944) is a distinguished professor of linguistics at Purdue University. He is the author of Semantic Mechanisms of Humor (1985) and Ontological Semantics (2004) with Sergei Nirenburg and served as the founding editor of Humor, the journal for the International Society for Humor Studies.
Victor Raskin was born in Irbit, USSR (now Russian Federation) in 1944. He obtained a doctorate in linguistics from Moscow State University in 1970. He has been married to Marina Bergelson since 1965; his daughter Sarah was born in 1982. He and his wife emigrated from the U.S.S.R. to Israel in 1973, and have been Israeli citizens since 1973. They moved to the United States in 1978, became permanent residents of the United States in 1979, and became U.S. citizens in 1984.[citation needed]
At Purdue University, Raskin was a professor in the Department of English and the Department of Linguistics. He is also a founding faculty member and associate director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS). He retired in 2023.
This approach to linguistic meaning differs significantly from truth-conditional/model-theoretic semantics in that it is focused on the meaning of the lexical items as well as on their syntactic relations, rather than on whether the sentences are true or false. Meaning is characterized as a semantic graph (network) consisting of edges (labeled links, such as hyponym, hyperonym, part-of, agent, etc.) and of vertices or nodes (i.e., the scripts). Thus for example, the script for APPLE would be connected by a link labeled ISA (a.k.a, hyperonym) connecting to the script for FRUIT and by various part-of links to other scripts such as PEEL, SEEDS, CORE, FLESH, STEM, etc. Hence the meaning of the word apple is given by the set of links of the script APPLE.
The meaning of a sentence is determined through a process of disambiguation, in which for example the other meanings of “apple” are discarded by contextual pressure (so the sense of “apple” as the computer company is discarded if the sentence reads “the child ate an apple.” However, script-based semantics which many aspects of meaning that are usually seen as part of pragmatics (for example, implicatures, goals, etc.).
Semantic scripts theory is closely related to frame semantics and schema theory and in fact shares their origins in psychology (Bartlett's schemata) and in the work on Artificial Intelligence in the 1970s (what is now known as Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence). Script-based semantics evolved in a computational direction in the 1990s and became ontological semantics.
Raskin's work in ontological semantics takes place in the context of machine translation. Raskin was one of the early proponents of ontological semantics (Raskin 1990; Nirenburg et al. 1995; Nirenburg and Raskin 2004). In ontological semantics, the ontology, i.e., the hierarchical tree of the ISA links is taken to define the semantic domain. This language independent structure is then mapped onto each individual language. This allows translation from any language into any other language using two dictionaries (for example, in the case of English to Chinese translation all that is needed is an English to ontology mapping and a Chinese to ontology mapping). The advantage of this approach appears when translation is needed between more than two languages. If translating between English, Chinese, Russian and Arabic, one needs English-Chinese, English-Arabic, and English-Russian mappings, but also Chinese-Arabic, Chinese-Russian, and Arabic-Russian mappings (in other words, (n -1)! mappings) whereas one needs only n language to ontology mappings.
Ontological semantics inherits the foundations and all the complex theoretical apparatus of script-based semantics and advances a set of micro-theories (aspect, tense, adjectives, etc.) that cover specific sub-areas of interest in semantics. Given that it is dedicated to actual translation it also incorporates an onomasticon (list of proper names) and a fact database. Procedurally, ontological semantics translates a given text into a Text-Meaning Representation (TMR) which is language independent and consist of items in the ontology and specifies their relations (for example Mary is the AGENT and the “ball” is the PATIENT).