Umbrella Term

Umbrella Terms are the words or terms used to cover a broad category of things rather than something specific. In linguistics terminology, it is called hypernym, a word or phrase used to describe a group of varying but also, identifiably related in some terms. It's used to denote or represent something generally rather than specifically. For example:

“History is an Umbrella Term comprising 'past events' as well as the 'memories', 'discoveries', 'collections', 'organizations', presentations, and interpretation of these events.”

...says Wikipedia !!

One Pink and few Grey Umbrellas... by Noah Näf
One Pink and few Grey Umbrellas... Photograph courtesy Noah Näf under the Unsplash License.

Umbrella Terms are also sometimes called as Blanket Terms, because of their nature of generalizing things and covering a lot of areas – and hence, the blanket term. Though, it is more of slang. But Umbrella Terms are very useful in Natural Language Processing in Computer Science.

Umbrella Terms are used in comparing and simplifying the semantic relations of the words and phrases. They can also be treated as the more general representation of the identifying words or phrases, therefore, they are used in the:

  • is-a relationship model mapping in knowledge representation in computers: like “Water is a Liquid”, “Earth is a Planet”, etc
  • Semantic Compression of the Natural Language Processing in software: by generalization to reduce a level of specialization in the phrases

And this is it - at least for tonight, July 10th 2022 - Day 4




This essay was published on July 10th, 2022 and has been viewed 2 times.



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