Inconsistencies for Meronymy/Holonymy

[simongray]

In general, when reading through the documentation, I am a bit uncertain what Concepts A and B really refer to. I would expect Concept A to always be the first entity in an outgoing relationship with Concept B, such that B satisfies some attribute of A, i.e.

A   :has_some_named_attribute_satifisfied_by   B

relation(A, B)

However, in some cases this does not seem to be the case.

In certain cases, A and B seems to be backreferences to similarly-named entities A and B in their opposite relation entries. The order of mention seems to be the thing to go by in those cases (i.e. the first mentioned entity is the first entity in the triple rather than A), but this is not consistent either.

As a sidenote, A and B are often randomly called X and Y throughout the documentation before going back to being called A and B again. My intuition tells me to replace X with A and Y with B, but that introduces contradictions in certain places (see examples further down).

Basically, the naming of the entities seems quite random and it makes using this resource as a source of truth for my work a bit hard. Right now I have to resort to deducing the intended usage from the published XML files of the English Wordnet instead. Hopefully, creating Github issues such as this one will help make the resource more consistent. It is still a wonderful piece of documentation, but it seems to need a little work.

Examples of what I find confusing:

• Meronym: The short description says "Y makes up a part of X" but the definition says "concept A makes up a part of concept B". So which is it?
• Holonym: Has the reverse short description of Meronym which is to be expected, but the definition further down is the exact same as Meronym.
• Location Meronym: The description says "X is a place located in Y" and this is consistent with the definition further down which says "concept A is a place located in concept B". However, this seems inconsistent with the Meronym entry above which states that "Y makes up a part of X".
• Location Holonym: "Y is a place located in X" - again this seems inconsistent with the description of the Holonym entry which states "X makes up a part of Y".
• Member Meronym: "Concept A is a member of Concept B" - seems inconsistent with Meronym which states "Y makes up a part of X". The canonical example provided also contradicts the single example under the Examples heading, i.e. "player has member-meronym team" is the opposite direction of "fleet has member-meronym ship".
• Member Holonym: "Concept B is a member of Concept A" - seems inconsistent with Holonym which states "X makes up a part of Y". Like with Member Meronym, the canonical example provided also contradicts the single example under the Examples heading.
• Part Meronym: "concept A is a component of concept B" - seems inconsistent with Meronym which states "Y makes up a part of X". Both examples seem to contradict the definition (opposite direction).
• Part Holonym: "Concept B is the whole where Concept A is a part" - so this one is actually consistent with Holonym which states "X makes up a part of Y", although the description itself mentions the entities in opposite order which is a bit confusing. We could perhaps rewrite it as "concept A is a component of concept B" instead which is the same meaning, but unfortunately also the exact same description as Part Meronym which is obviously contradictory.
• Portion Meronym: "X is an amount/piece/portion of Y" - inconsistent with Meronym which states "Y makes up a part of X". Furthermore, the canonical example and the example under the Examples heading seems contradictory (opposite directions).
• Portion Holonym: Same issues as Portion Meronym.
• Substance Meronym: "Concept A is made of concept B." - inconsistent with Meronym which states "Y makes up a part of X".
• Substance Holonym: "Concept-B is a substance of Concept-A" - seems to be semantically the same as the definition for Substance Meronym (B is the substance in both cases).

In general, the directionality of many of these relations seems to be opposite of the prior usages they are intending to subsume, e.g. in DanNet has_holo_member goes from member to group and has_holo_madeof goes from substance to whole, while has_mero_madeof and has_mero_member go in the opposite direction. Some quick googling tells me that is also how these attributes have been used in other WordNets, see e.g. descriptions for the Estonian Wordnet.

[goodmami]

Thanks for the detailed report! We recently concluded a documentation push where we, among other things, tried to standardize the A/B vs X/Y things, but it seems like we've missed some. Similarly, we had issues with the description being the reverse of what they should be. It seems there is still a lot of work to do.

[simongray]

NP!

If I may make one suggestion it would be to always have a representation of the actual directionality somewhere in the entry, i.e.

A -> B

(... or whatever triple representation you favour) which makes it clear which part A is referring to and which part B is referring to.

Then you can flip this relationship for the entry describing the reverse relationship:

B -> A

and reuse the entity names so they still reflect the same entity types, that is: use them as backreferences. This would also allow you to reuse many of the written descriptions for the reverse relationships.

However, without a consistent codification of the relationships inside the entries, the descriptions are quite useless and it actually becomes very hard to spot the errors.

[goodmami]

That's a good idea. Sometimes the directionality is confusing even when the wording is correct.