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I suspect that "natural language processing" means something done with computers. If so, the article should say so, so that people like me won't have to suspect. I have seen the words "agent" and "patient" used in linguistics as it developed long before computers existed, and of course everone has heard of "nominative case", "accusative case", etc., when they studied grammar. So I suspect that this is yet another case of software experts thinking something that existed 200 or 2000 years before computers existed was invented by software experts. I've seen this in regard to, for example, mathematical induction (a standard part of high-school math long before computers were around), lattice theory (introduced in the 19th century), and even Euclid's algorithm. I will be pleased if I am wrong in this suspicion. Michael Hardy 23:00 Mar 17, 2003 (UTC)

Patient is about the medical use of the word. Is there a linguistic meaning beyond a dictionary definition? If so, disambiguation is necessary. Tuf-Kat

IEEE SUMO describes it as follows... is this text free of copyright restrictions?

SUMO property patient: instance of CaseRole; ( patient ?PROCESS ?ENTITY ) means that ?ENTITY is a participant in ?PROCESS that may be moved, said, experienced, etc. For example, the direct objects in the sentences 'The cat swallowed the canary' and 'Billy likes the beer' would be examples of patients. Note that the patient of a Process may or may not undergo structural change as a result of the Process. The CaseRole of patient is used when one wants to specify as broadly as possible the object of a Process.

the ontology is merged from a set of more specialized ontologies, the owners of which have filed copyright disclaimers for the respective components; if IEEE were to make claims, wouldn't this defeat the purpose of SUMO?

These are very distinct. Suggest use of Patient (linguistic semantics) or Patient (knowledge represenation)

I still suspect that this is not a well-written article as it stands. Why does it say "in English", to the exclusion of other languages? Is something particularly different about English? German, Russian, and Greek make explicit case distinctions in forms of nouns; English does not. What does "spatially distinguished" mean? I think of nominative, accusative, dative, etc. as syntactic roles; how are they "spatially distinguished"? Michael Hardy 01:17 Mar 19, 2003 (UTC)

'in english' has no business being there. and case role's are not about syntax, they provide hooks into the semantics. the wording spatially distinguished comes from SUMO.

"spatially distinguished" means they're not in the same space.. they are apart from each other, although they may touch one another. 216.130.212.63 00:19, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Vi.gomez (talk) 20:04, 3 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

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