SAMUELS (Semantic Annotation and Mark-Up for Enhancing Lexical Searches)
From the webpage:
The SAMUELS project (Semantic Annotation and Mark-Up for Enhancing Lexical Searches) is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in conjunction with the Economic and Social Research Council (grant reference AH/L010062/1) from January 2014 to April 2015. It will deliver a system for automatically annotating words in texts with their precise meanings, disambiguating between possible meanings of the same word, ultimately enabling a step-change in the way we deal with large textual data. It uses the Historical Thesaurus of English as its core dataset, and will provide for each word in a text the Historical Thesaurus reference code for that concept. Textual data tagged in this way can then be accurately searched and precisely investigated, producing results which can be automatically aggregated at a range of levels of precision. The project also draws on a series of research sub-projects which will employ the software thus developed, testing and validating the utility of the SAMUELS tagger as a tool for wide-ranging further research.
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To really appreciate this project, visit SAMUELS English Semantic Tagger Test Site.
There you can enter up to 2000 English words and select low/upper year boundaries!
Just picking a text at random, ;-), I chose:
Greenpeace flew its 135-foot-long thermal airship over the Bluffdale, UT, data center early Friday morning, carrying the message: “NSA Illegal Spying Below” along with a link steering people to a new web site, StandAgainstSpying.org, which the three groups launched with the support of a separate, diverse coalition of over 20 grassroots advocacy groups and Internet companies. The site grades members of Congress on what they have done, or often not done, to rein in the NSA.
Some terms and Semtag3 by time period:
1500-1600:
- congress: C09d01 [Sexual intercourse]; E07e16 [Inclination]; E08e12 [Movement towards a thing/person/position]
- data: 04.10[Unrecognised]
- thermal: 04.10[Unrecognised]
- UT: 04.10[Unrecognised]
- web: B06a07 [Disorders of eye/vision]; B22h08 [Class Arachnida (spiders, scorpions)]; B10 [Biological Substance];
1700-1800
- congress: S06k17a [Diplomacy]; C09d01 [Sexual intercourse]; E07e16 [Inclination];
- data: 04.10[Unrecognised]
- thermal: 04.10[Unrecognised]
- UT: 04.10[Unrecognised]
- web: B06a07 [Disorders of eye/vision]; B22h08 [Class Arachnida (spiders, scorpions)]; B10 [Biological Substance];
1800-1900
- congress: S06k17a [Diplomacy]; C09d01 [Sexual intercourse]; O07 [Conversation];
- data: H55a [Attestation, witness, evidence];
- thermal: A04b02 [Spring]; C09a [Sexual desire]; D03c02 [Heat];
- UT: 04.10[Unrecognised]
- web: B06a07 [Disorders of eye/vision]; B06d01 [Deformities of specific parts]; B25d [Tools and implements];
1900-2000
- congress: S06k17a [Diplomacy]; C09d01 [Sexual intercourse]; O07 [Conversation];
- data: F04v04 [Data]; H55a [Attestation, witness, evidence]; W05 [Information];
- thermal: A04b02 [Spring]; B28b [Types/styles of clothing]; D03c02 [Heat];
- UT: 04.10[Unrecognised]
- web: B06d01 [Deformities of specific parts]; B22h08 [Class Arachnida (spiders, scorpions)]; B10 [Biological Substance];
2000-2014
- congress: 04.10[Unrecognised]
- data: 04.10[Unrecognised]
- thermal: 04.10[Unrecognised]
- UT: 04.10[Unrecognised]
- web: 04.10[Unrecognised]
I am assuming that the “04.10[unrecognized]” for all terms in 2000-2014 means there is no usage data for that time period.
I have never heard anyone deny that meanings of words change over time and domain.
What remains a mystery is why the value-add of documenting the meanings of words isn’t obvious?
I say “words,” I should be saying “data.” Remembering the loss of the $125 Million Mars Climate Orbiter. One system read a value as “pounds of force” and another read the same data as “newtons.” In that scenario, ET doesn’t get to call home.
So let’s rephrase the question to: Why isn’t the value-add of documenting the semantics of data obvious?
Suggestions?