Sortal Incorrectness in Conceptual Graphs

Abstract

Sortal incorrectness is an age-old problem to philosophers and linguists. It is an important issue to knowledge representation researchers. This paper is an exercise based on those examples used to illustrate sortal incorrectness in various papers cited in the reference. We analyse these example sentences using Sowa's conceptual graph theory. We outline in this paper how sortally incorrect knowledge items are kept from being admitted into a knowledge base. In the process we make some rather interesting observations concerning the organization of concept catalogue and the treatments of external negation and adverb-related sortal incorrectness.