Concepts in application context

Abstract

Formal concept analysis (FCA) derives a hierarchy of concepts in a formal context that relates objects with attributes. This approach is very well aligned with the traditions of Frege, Saussure and Peirce, which relate a signifier (e.g. a word/an attribute) to a mental concept evoked by this word and meant to refer to a specific object in the real world. However, in the practice of natural languages as well as artificial languages (e.g. programming languages), the application context often constitutes a latent variable that influences the interpretation of a signifier. We present some of our current work that analyzes the usage of words in natural language in varying application contexts as well as the usage of variables in programming languages in varying application contexts in order to provide conceptual constraints on these signifiers.