Genesis 1:1-3 in Graphs: Extracting Conceptual Structures

Abstract

Automatically transforming text to conceptual graphs has long been a goal of the Conceptual Graphs community, starting with Sowa and Way’s seminal paper in 1986. We have developed a method for transforming Old Testament texts in Hebrew into English-based conceptual graphs, and in this paper, we report on our method and its results. The method utilizes the text itself, a syntactic analysis of the text, an ontology of the text, plus some transformational rules. The end result is CGs with “shallow semantics” which can be deemed by a human to represent faithfully, if somewhat sterilely, a possible meaning of the original text. We argue that the method is general enough that it could be applied to texts in other languages.