Describing Capability Through Lexical Semantics Exploitation: Foundational Arguments

In everyday life as well as in asymmetric warfare domain, to achieve the intended goals, agents often do not make use of the designed and purpose-built tools, but some other tools whose features simply fit for the purpose. The present paper discusses the possibility of capturing and integrating relations and features from context that could drive the retrieval of possible candidate substitutes for the properly designed artifacts through Lexical Semantics Exploitation. Generative Lexicon theory assumes a structure (Qualia Structure) organizing the semantic content carried by lexical items through roles. Among them, the Telic role exposes the function or purpose of the predicated entity and the Constitutive role exposes its component parts. We argue that the typical function an entity has been thought for is related to its internal constituents. We also argue that a knowledge base and a proper metrics can be conveniently built extracting Qualia elements from suitable text corpora.