I don’t think the difference is pessimism about ontology identification per se. You overall approach (if successful) seems like it would do zero-shot transfer learning. My perspective would be something like: OK, let’s try and understand when we can do zero-shot transfer learning at all, and what assumptions we need to rely on (incidentally, I am also pessimistic about this). You are instead focusing on a different simplification of the problem, one which (I feel) is less likely to be connected to the most important underlying difficulties, and less likely to quickly provide information about whether the overall approach can work.
I don’t think the difference is pessimism about ontology identification per se. You overall approach (if successful) seems like it would do zero-shot transfer learning. My perspective would be something like: OK, let’s try and understand when we can do zero-shot transfer learning at all, and what assumptions we need to rely on (incidentally, I am also pessimistic about this). You are instead focusing on a different simplification of the problem, one which (I feel) is less likely to be connected to the most important underlying difficulties, and less likely to quickly provide information about whether the overall approach can work.