Knowledge Structure
Both nouns and verbs are organized into hierarchies, defined by hypernym or IS A relationships. For instance, the first sense of the word dog would have the following hypernym hierarchy; the words at the same level are synonyms of each other: some sense of dog is synonymous with some other senses of domestic dog and Canis lupus familiaris, and so on. Each set of synonyms (synset), has a unique index and shares its properties, such as a gloss (or dictionary) definition.
dog, domestic dog, Canis familiaris => canine, canid => carnivore => placental, placental mammal, eutherian, eutherian mammal => mammal => vertebrate, craniate => chordate => animal, animate being, beast, brute, creature, fauna => ...At the top level, these hierarchies are organized into base types, 25 primitive groups for nouns, and 15 for verbs. These groups form lexicographic files at a maintenance level. These primitive groups are connected to an abstract root node that has, for some time, been assumed by various applications that use WordNet.
In the case of adjectives, the organization is different. Two opposite 'head' senses work as binary poles, while 'satellite' synonyms connect to each of the heads via synonymy relations. Thus, the hierarchies, and the concept involved with lexicographic files, do not apply here the same way they do for nouns and verbs.
The network of nouns is far deeper than that of the other parts of speech. Verbs have a far bushier structure, and adjectives are organized into many distinct clusters. Adverbs are defined in terms of the adjectives they are derived from, and thus inherit their structure from that of the adjectives.
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Famous quotes containing the words knowledge and/or structure:
“What we know is not capable of being otherwise; of things capable of being otherwise we do not know, when they have passed outside our observation, whether they exist or not. Therefore the object of knowledge is of necessity. Therefore it is eternal; for things that are of necessity in the unqualified sense are all eternal; and things that are eternal are ungenerated and imperishable.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“Why does philosophy use concepts and why does faith use symbols if both try to express the same ultimate? The answer, of course, is that the relation to the ultimate is not the same in each case. The philosophical relation is in principle a detached description of the basic structure in which the ultimate manifests itself. The relation of faith is in principle an involved expression of concern about the meaning of the ultimate for the faithful.”
—Paul Tillich (1886–1965)