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<Paper uid="W03-0905">
  <Title>The Genesis of a Script for Bankruptcy in Ontological Semantics</Title>
  <Section position="6" start_page="3" end_page="3" type="evalu">
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4 Heuristics
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    <Paragraph position="0"> As massive research on expert systems in the 1980s abundantly demonstrated, knowledge engineering requires human intelligence and stubbornly resists automation. Moreover, human intelligence must be devoted to heuristics, another highly non-trivial intellectual process. Deciding what goes into a script requires knowledge engineering and heuristics. Part of the problem is similar to the task of extending the ontology to a new domain--something the ontological semantics community has had to face a number of times for various applications, most recently for information security applications (Raskin et al., 2002). There are three main sources for obtaining and structuring the required information to chart out a new domain or to fill out a new script: * dictionaries, encyclopedias, thesauri; * textbooks and reference books; * pertinent corpora, most conveniently websites.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> General common sense or a small sample of pertinent texts brings up a small number of apparently basic terms. These terms are looked up in the first source, and that leads to the second. A selection of key terms forms the basis of an Internet search that brings up the corpora. Thus, in the case of bankruptcy, the term itself brings up an informative entry from Barron's Finance and Investment Handbook (1995).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> &amp;quot;BANKRUPTCY State of insolvency of an individual or an organization--in other words, an inability to pay debts. There are two kinds of legal bankruptcy under U S. law: involuntary, when one or more creditors petition to have a debtor judged insolvent by a court; and voluntary, when the debtor brings the petition. In both cases, the objective is an orderly and equitable settlement of obligations.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The 1978 Bankruptcy Reform Act removed some of the rigidities of the old law and permitted more flexibility in procedures. The Bankruptcy Reform, Act of 1984 curtailed some of the more liberal provisions (mainly affecting consumer bankruptcy) of the 1978 act.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Chapter 7 of the 1978 act, dealing with LIQUIDATION, provides for a court appointed interim trustee with broad powers and discretion to make management changes, arrange unsecured financing, and generally operate the debtor business in such a way as to prevent loss. Only by filing an appropriate bond is the debtor able to regain possession from the trustee.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Chapter 11, which deals with REORGANIZATION, provides that, unless the court rules otherwise, the debtor remains in possession of the business and in control of its operation. Debtor and creditors are allowed considerable flexibility in working together. The 1978 law relaxes the old absolute priority rule, which gave creditor claims categorical precedence over ownership claims. It also makes possible the negotiation of payment schedules, the restructuring of debt, and even the granting of loans by the creditor to the debtor.&amp;quot; The entry, while somewhat cryptical, offers a pretty good guide for what to look for in a textbook or in legal sources. It can easily lead to a number of sources of the textbook category, such as Summers (1989), Caplan (1992), Davidson (1992). The pertinent information, thus acquired, helps to identify the corpora, which should be both essential for the domain and crucial for the application(s), such as the various bankruptcyrelated pages at http://www.uslaw.com/. Just as in field linguistics (cf. Samarin 1967), the corpora should be varied, multi-sourced, and as representative/exhaustive as possible. The corpora give us a good sense of the grain size of the information to be included in the script--see more on this in Section 6.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> The most important step is to structure this information in the script. Models of the script's series of events obtained at the previous stage and their key concepts need to be checked against the ontology before the scripting takes place, to avoid later, costly adaptation of newly introduced concepts to the existing inventory.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> The models will also tend to pay too much attention to details from the field to which they belong. These details have to be weeded out and the parts of the models to be united into the script have to be translated into ontological concepts, existing and, if necessary, newly acquired.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> The methods for doing this are not easy to formulate as recommendations, let alone rules. A similar situation in lexical and ontological acquisition leads, with experience, to pretty well-established routines and, as a result of adhering to them, quite good uniformity among different acquirers. Our work on routine acquisition of full-fledged scripts has only been going on for slightly over a year and has included only two domains so far, the financial domain and the domain of meetings. We hope to be able to make enough useful generalizations in the style of Chapter 9 on acquisition of ontological concepts and lexical entries in Nirenburg and Raskin (2003) as we acquire more practical experience. The discovery of heuristic rules remains a major challenge, possibly unattainable. null The following are the factors to be identified in the script as concepts: * the candidates for component events; * the concepts involved in/created by the series of events; * the goals of the component events; * their temporal and causal relations leading to their groupings into subscripts; * decision forks, such as whether to file Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 bankruptcies.</Paragraph>
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