A formal model of semantic computing

Abstract

In the existing works of semantic computing (SC), the word “computing” in the phrase “semantic computing” means computational implementations of semantics reasoning (e.g., ontology reasoning, rule reasoning, semantic query, and semantic search) but is irrelevant to the formal theory of computation (e.g., computational models such as finite automaton, pushdown automaton, and Turing machine). In this paper, we propose a different understanding of “semantic computing” from a computation theory perspective. Concretely, we present a formal model of SC in terms of automata and discuss SC for the two most important and simplest types of automata, namely finite automata and pushdown automata. For each automaton, we first consider a simple case (equivalent concepts) and then we further investigate a general situation (semantically related concepts). That is, some new automata for SC are provided: finite (or pushdown) automaton for SC under equivalent concepts, finite (or pushdown) automaton for SC w.r.t. external words, nondeterministic finite automaton for SC under equivalent concepts (or w.r.t. external words), fuzzy finite (or pushdown) automaton for SC under semantically related concepts, and fuzzy finite (or pushdown) automaton for SC w.r.t. external words. Furthermore, we give some properties of these new automata for SC and prove that these new automata are extensions (or enlargements) of traditional (fuzzy) automata.