Verification of conceptual models based on linguistic knowledge

摘要

As conceptual models reflect people's perception of real-world phenomena, they are closely tied to the way people describe and talk about these phenomena in natural language. The models, used for developing database and information systems and for presenting or explaining databases, usually include linguistic notions to help interpret their contents. In this paper, we show how linguistic knowledge from a semantically based lexicon can be used to check the quality of conceptual models. The check is a natural extension of traditional verification checks, and its purpose is to ensure that words and phrases included in the models are used in a linguistically meaningful way. Linguistic expressions must be of the correct type, and the relationships between expressions in the model must be acceptable with respect to the semantic constraints indicated in the lexicon.