[Data-modeling] word puzzle

[Jeff Prucher]

I think it's interesting that you've just made a "links to" property for the
topic(s) that the word designates. This is a lot simpler than trying to
model anything like senses (the verb "act" has lots of different senses, for
example, but only one easily corresponds to a topic, and even that is
debatable, since "acting" is a noun), which has been a hang-up for past
attempts.  If someone wanted to do something WordNetty with this, that would
have to change, but WordNet itself is so complex it would require its own
schema anyway.

Other thoughts:
Conjugation only applies to verbs; other parts of speech inflect
differently. Should that property be on a Verb type, that would be cotyped
with Word? You could then have a Noun type with Declension information, etc.
I'd rename the "conjugation" type, as well -- I think the term for a single
verb form is "conjugate".  For English, how would you enter the conjugates
for "act"? Would you have topics for "I act", "You act", "He/she/it acts",
etc.?

Quibbles: "Conditional Mood" is a mood, not a tense.

I also don't know how well this internationalizes -- I'm flipping through
the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, and note that Japanese apparently
marks time relationships ("tense") on adjectives and Potowatami marks it on
both verbs and nouns. I also see that Russian verbs have gender. Etc.  Maybe
the thing to do, then, is to completely generalize the Conjugation type with
properties (going from the CEL here) for Aspect, Case, Gender, Mood, Number,
Person, Tense, and Voice for all words, and just leave them what don't make
sense blank. 

Backing up for a second, let me ask if we really want to reify every
inflected form of?

Jeff

> -----Original Message-----
> From: data-modeling-bounces at freebase.com 
> [mailto:data-modeling-bounces at freebase.com] On Behalf Of spencer kelly
> Sent: Wednesday, April 01, 2009 7:26 PM
> To: Freebase data modeling mailing list
> Subject: Re: [Data-modeling] word puzzle
> 
> hey so i made an early draft-
> http://words.freebase.com/view/base/words/french_word
> 
> its not so awkward actually. only a little verbose. I've 
> admin'd you both.
> anyone got the guts to make this relevant, and import something? 
> what would be useful? i'd like to see a view of topics by 
> grammatical gender
> :)
> 
>