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Amarakośa is the most celebrated and authoritative ancient thesaurus of Sanskrit. It is one of the books which an Indian child learning through Indian traditional educational system memorizes as early as his first year of formal learning. Though it appears as a linear list of words, close inspection of it shows a rich organisation of words expressing various relations a word bears with other words. Thus when a child studies Amarakośa further, the linear list of words unfolds into a knowledge web. In this paper we describe our effort to make the implicit knowledge in Amarakośa explicit. A model for storing such structure is discussed and a web tool is described that answers the queries by reconstructing the links among words from the structured tables dynamically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of polysemy involves having terms, such as ˵truck″, that refer to multiple concepts in different contexts; and conversely, having the same concept referred to with different names in different contexts. Contexts may be defined along different dimensions, such as language (Italian, English, French, ...), domain (Philosophy, Computer Science, Physics, ...), time (Ancient Greece, 20th century, ...) etc. Given a conceptual model M (aka ontology), a context C and a query Q we motivate and propose algorithms for interpreting all the terms of the query with respect to M and C. We also define and solve the inverse problem: given a set of concepts S which are part of the answer to query Q and a context C, we propose algorithms for choosing terms for all the concepts in S. To illustrate the framework, we use a case study involving a history ontology whose elements are named differently depending on the time period and language of the query. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work proposes a basic framework for resolving sense disambiguation through the use of Semantic Lexicon, a machine readable dictionary managing both word senses and lexico-semantic relations. More specifically, polysemous ambiguity characterizing Web documents is discussed. The adopted Semantic Lexicon is WordNet, a lexical knowledge-base of English words widely adopted in many research studies referring to knowledge discovery. The proposed approach extends recent works on knowledge discovery by focusing on the sense disambiguation aspect. By exploiting the structure of WordNet database, lexico-semantic features are used to resolve the inherent sense ambiguity of written text with particular reference to HTML resources. The obtained results may be extended to generic hypertextual repositories as well. Experiments show that polysemy reduction can be used to hint about the meaning of specific senses in given contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Word meaning ambiguity has always been an important problem in information retrieval and extraction, as well as, text mining (documents clustering and classification). Knowledge discovery tasks such as automatic ontology building and maintenance would also profit from simple and efficient methods for discovering word meanings. The paper presents a novel text mining approach to discovering word meanings. The offered measures of their context are expressed by means of frequent termsets. The presented methods have been implemented with efficient data mining techniques. The approach is domain- and language-independent, although it requires applying part of speech tagger. The paper includes sample results obtained with the presented methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science fiction classic Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1956) is conventionally read as a humanist political allegory about the Cold War Recent critics have used it as a pretext to discuss issues such as posthumanism and postmodernism. The ongoing popular interest in the film, the proliferating versions of the story, and scholarly contestations about its significance indicate that there is little about the film that is singular. The film exemplifies a hidden aspect of the old saying 'the more things change the more they stay the same'- the townspeople of Santa Mira are "always already" not themselves, they just don't know it. Difference and ambiguity permeate the film and the motif of the 'doublesome' pods is replicated on a number of levels: production, consumption, generic structures and screenplay. Reading the film in terms of poststructuralist concepts such as performativity, the paper suggests that Invasion of the Body Snatchers is an early posthumanist text and has much to offer as a site for exploring issues associated with cinema, subjectivity, the nature of the real and what it means to be human in the contemporary world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heidegger, Schenker, music, and modern musicology I begin this chapter by making it clear how the concluding pair ought not to be read. There are two principal reasons why this is necessary. First, the question must arise why I choose Heidegger as a basis for my approach to a musical hermeneutics when the names of J. L. Austin, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida are more familiar, and have been put to interesting use in recent years in this context. I believe in the binding necessity of acknowledging the hermeneutic circle in the fullest possible sense, but choose to be led round it by Heidegger rather than the others, because I believe that Heidegger is a better grounding than they are for a musical hermeneutics. Gadamer seems to me a more persuasive follower of Heidegger than Derrida, but while some of Gadamer's refinements of Heidegger are valuable, and I shall call on them occasionally, the original arguments are still the most useful guide to hermeneutic enquiry, not least because Heidegger's hermeneutics extend beyond the interpretation of texts into the interpretation of human being and Being as such. I should therefore explain where I disagree with some of the philosophy underlying wings of ‘the new musicology’, and at the same time pre-empt new-musicological criticisms of my own hermeneutic strategy. My argument is essentially ontological, being concerned with the nature of music, and my claim is that Heideggerian thinking can keep a hermeneutics solidly on track. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]