Region-Based Merging of Open-Domain Terminological Knowledge
This addresses the challenge of integrating inconsistent terminological data for applications in knowledge representation and AI, though it appears incremental as it adapts existing formalisms to a new context.
The paper tackles the problem of merging open-domain terminological knowledge from conflicting sources by using the Region Connection Calculus (RCC5) to translate knowledge into region spaces, perform merging, and translate back, resulting in a principled approach to handle conflicts.
This paper introduces a novel method for merging open-domain terminological knowledge. It takes advantage of the Region Connection Calculus (RCC5), a formalism used to represent regions in a topological space and to reason about their set-theoretic relationships. To this end, we first propose a faithful translation of terminological knowledge provided by several and potentially conflicting sources into region spaces. The merging is then performed on these spaces, and the result is translated back into the underlying language of the input sources. Our approach allows us to benefit from the expressivity and the flexibility of RCC5 while dealing with conflicting knowledge in a principled way.