Abstract
We are compiling a repository of minimal, broadly applicable concepts for the benefit of performers in DARPA’s Communicating with Computers (CwC) program. Dubbed ‘Elementary Composable Ideas’ or ECIs, these concepts are broadly applicable cross-domain concepts that underly many lexical semantic terms. As the basis for the ECI repository, we are incorporating and adapting ontological and lexical resources that appear in various forms in TRIPS, VerbNet, Hobbs’ commonsense axioms and others sources, and using ideas from DOLCE, Generative Lexicon, and object-oriented knowledge representation to create a common representational framework that supports composition and interpretation in different contexts using the same ECIs. After motivating this effort and looking at the sources we are incorporating, we illustrate the kind of abstraction and conceptual composition we hope to achieve by looking at selected examples in the treatment of space and time as regions and the specialization of preposition interpretation through composition.