Posts Tagged ‘name’

Romeo Montague once noted that the semantic function of a name contrasts quite saliently with that of an ordinary word. Shakespeare didn’t quite put it that way, but it is a fact of language. Classic semanticist would frame it as a distinction between denotation (i.e. identification) versus connotation (i.e. description).

As it turns out, this difference can be seen even at the statistical level. Ordinary words with a little massaging have a frequency distribution best described as binomial; names are typically not binomial. That will have consequences for how we mine text data to create a semantic dictionary.

This is all a fine point, but the quality of a product is determined by many such fine points. None of our API competitors on the web bother with denotation and connotation, but it can really matter when you are processing data with many product designations.

In Chapter 8 of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” our intrepid logical adventurer is talking to the White Knight, who wants to sing to her. He says, “The name of the song is called ‘HADDOCK’S EYES.’”

It turns out of course that the name of the song is really “THE AGED AGED MAN,” though the song is actually called “WAYS AND MEANS.” The confusion here about naming is quite understandable to anyone who has ever ordered TenderSweet™ clams at HoJo’s and discovered that they are neither tender nor sweet.

All of this would be hilarious except that we have to build semantic dictionaries that must deal extensively with the meaning of names in text. This problem will take a while to talk about adequately; and so please tune in tomorrow.