
Chapter | 4 Natural Language and Dialogue Processing
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words in classes regrouping synonyms. The set of classes in a parti-
cular representation of the world (or at least of a domain) is called
its taxonomy, while the relationships between those classes is the
ontology. Such classifications have been of interest for a very long
time and arise in Aristotle’s writings in which he suggested the fol-
lowing major classes: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place,
time, position, state, action and affection. Some information has to be
enclosed in the semantic representation. For example, the verb is often
described as the word in a sentence that expresses ...