5. Semantic functions
A
lot of work in the building of a Suregen-II application can be saved by
the observation that certain constellations of instances, attributes and
their respective descriptions tend to reappear. For instance, in the above
“thing”-example we have realized an “attribution” or “qualification”:
A certain quality (in this case “colour”)
is attributed to an instance of a concept (“thing”). As attributions such
as this one are quite frequent in medical documents it is worth the effort
to define it only once as SemanticFunction
and use it wherever necessary. A simplified version of this function (which
is already defined in Suregen-II) could look like:
(SuregenNamedInstance
t-attribution SuregenSemanticFunction
:obligatory '((concept SuregenObject) (attribute T))
:templates '((:MC (Main-Clause
:subject (Noun-phrase :noun concept
:pronoun
:neutral)
:predicate (Verb-form "sein")
:adjective attribute))
(:NP
(Noun-phrase :noun concept
:pronoun
:indefinite
:adjective attribute))))
This
creates an instance, named t-attribution,
with two obligatory roles (concept
andattribute).
Its templates-slot
hold m.m. the same expressions as previously used in the ToDescribe-expressions
for thing. Now it must be specified which slots of a thing fulfil which
role wrt. this definition:
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semantic functions (cont'd)
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