Open AccessUniversal abstracting
Author(s) -
Strotmann Andreas
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
proceedings of the american society for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1550-8390
pISSN - 0044-7870
DOI - 10.1002/meet.2009.14504603102
Subject(s) - computer science , lingua franca , linguistics , machine translation , natural language processing , natural language , universal networking language , semantics (computer science) , representation (politics) , grammar , universal grammar , artificial intelligence , programming language , comprehension approach , generative grammar , philosophy , politics , political science , law
Abstracts are brief summaries of the content of a work, and they have long been used to improve international accessibility and/or dissemination, e.g., in the form of English abstracts for articles published in non‐English languages. Universal abstracts are similar in that they summarize the meaning of a work, but the indexer creates them in a special lingua franca that makes them available in any language, not just, say, English. Universal abstracting is performed by an indexer using a piece of software that guides him or her in creating a language‐independent summary of the abstracted work. The abstract is written in a stylized form of the indexer's own language; internally, a knowledge representation that combines multilingual controlled vocabularies with a universal grammar based on the Montague Semantics for natural language is created. This form enables high‐quality automatic translation – the internal representation is universal and localizes to any language or mode of communication.