# Logic, diagrams, or natural language for representing temporal constraints in conceptual modeling languages?

Spoiler alert of the answer: it depends. In this post, I’ll trace it back to how we got to that conclusion and refine it to what it depends on.

There are several conceptual modelling languages with extensions for temporal constraints that then will be used in a database to ensure data integrity with respect to the business rules. For instance, there may be a rule for some information system that states that “all managers in a company must have been employees of that company already” or “all postgraduate students must also be a teaching assistant for some time during their studies”. The question then becomes how to get the modellers to model this sort of information in the best way. The first step in that direction is figuring out the best way to represent temporal constraints. We already know that icons aren’t that unambiguous and easy [1], which leaves the natural language rendering devised recently [2], or one of the logic-based notations, such as the temporal Description Logic DLRUS [3]. So, the questions to investigate thus became, more precisely:

• Which representation is preferred for representing temporal information: formal semantics, Description Logics (DL), a coding-style notation, diagrams, or template-based (pseudo-)natural language sentences?
• What would be easier to understand by modellers: a succinct logic-based notation, a graphical notation, or a ‘coding style’ notation?

To answer these questions, my collaborator, Sonia Berman (also at UCT) and I conducted a survey to find out modeller preference(s) and understanding of these representation modes. The outcome of the experiment is about to be presented at the 36th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER’17) that will be held next week in Valencia, Spain, and is described in more detail in the paper “Determining the preferred representation of temporal constraints in conceptual models” [4].

The survey consisted mainly of questions asking them about which representation they preferred, a few questions on trying to model it, and basic questions, like whether they had English as first language (see the questionnaire for details). Below is one of the questions to illustrate it.

One of the questions of the survey

Its option (a) is the semantics notation of the DLRUS Description Logic, its option (b) the short-hand notation in DLRUS, option (c) a coding-style notation we made up, and option (e) is the natural language rendering that came out of prior work [2]. Option (d) was devised for this experiment: it shows the constraint in the Temporal information Representation in Entity-Relationship Diagrams (TREND) language. TREND is an updated and extended version of ERVT [5], taking into account earlier published extensions for temporal relationships, temporal attributes, and quantitative constraints (e.g., ‘employee receives a bonus after two years’), a new extension for the distinction between optional and mandatory temporal constraints, and the notation preferences emanating from [1].

Here are some of the main quantitative results:

The top-rated representation modes and `dislike’ ratings.

These are aggregates, though, and they hide some variations in responses. For instance, representing ‘simple’ temporal constraints in the DL notation was still ok (though noting that diagrams were most preferred), but the more complex the constraints got, the more the preference for the natural language rendering. For instance, take “Person married-to Person may be followed by Person divorced-from Person, ending Person married-to Person.” is deemed easier to understand than $\langle o , o' \rangle \in marriedTo^{\mathcal{I}(t)} \rightarrow \exists t'>t. \langle o , o' \rangle \in divorcedFrom^{\mathcal{I}(t')} \land \langle o , o' \rangle \not\in marriedTo^{\mathcal{I}(t')}$ or $\diamond^+\mbox{{\sc RDev}}_{{\sf marriedTo,divorcedFrom}}$. Yet, the temporal relationship ${\sf marriedTo \sqsubseteq \diamond^* \neg marriedTo}$ was deemed easier to understand than “The objects participating in a fact in Person married to Person do not relate through married-to at some time”. Details of the experiment and more data and analysis are described in the paper [4]. In sum, the evaluation showed the following:

1. a clear preference for graphical or verbalised temporal constraints over the other three representations;
2. ‘simple’ temporal constraints were preferred graphically and complex temporal constraints preferred in natural language; and
3. their English specification of temporal constraints was inadequate.

Overall, this indicates that what is needed is some modeling tool that has a multi-modal interface for temporal conceptual model development, with the ability to switch between graphical and verbalised temporal constraints in particular.

If I hadn’t had teaching obligations (which now got cancelled due to student protests anyway) and no NRF funding cut in the incentive funding (rated researchers got to hear from one day to the next that it’ll be only 10% of what it used to be), I’d have presented the paper myself at ER’17. Instead, my co-author is on her way to all the fun. If you have any questions, suggestions, or comments, you can ask her at the conference, or drop me a line via email or in the comments below. If you’re interested in TREND: we’re working on a full paper with all the details and have conducted further modeling experiments with it, which we hope to finalise writing up by the end of the year (provided student protests won’t escalate and derail research plans any further).

References

[1] T. Shunmugam. Adoption of a visual model for temporal database representation. M. IT thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town, South Africa, 2016.

[2] Keet, C.M. Natural language template selection for temporal constraints. CREOL: Contextual Representation of Events and Objects in Language, Joint Ontology Workshops 2017, 21-23 September 2017, Bolzano, Italy. CEUR-WS Vol. (in print).

[3] A. Artale, E. Franconi, F. Wolter, and M. Zakharyaschev. A temporal description logic for reasoning about conceptual schemas and queries. In S. Flesca, S. Greco, N. Leone, and G. Ianni, editors, Proceedings of the 8th Joint European Conference on Logics in Artificial Intelligence (JELIA-02), volume 2424 of LNAI, pages 98-110. Springer Verlag, 2002.

[4] Keet, C.M., Berman, S. Determining the preferred representation of temporal constraints in conceptual models. 36th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER’17). Mayr, H.C., Guizzardi, G., Ma, H. Pastor. O. (Eds.). Springer LNCS vol. 10650, 437-450. 6-9 Nov 2017, Valencia, Spain.

[5] A. Artale, C. Parent, and S. Spaccapietra. Evolving objects in temporal information systems. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, 50(1-2):5-38, 2007.

# Part-whole relations and foundational ontologies

Part-whole relations seem like a never-ending story—and it still doesn’t bore me. In this case, the ingredients were the taxonomy of part-whole relations [1] and a couple of foundational ontologies and the aim was to link the former to the latter. But what started off with the intention to write just a short workshop note, for seemingly clear and just in need of actually doing it, turned out to be not so straightforward after all. The selected foundational ontologies were not as compatible as assumed, and creating the corresponding orchestration of OWL files was a ‘non-trivial exercise’.

What were (some of) the issues? On the one hand, there are multiple part-whole relations, which are typically named differently when they have a specific domain or range. For instance, to relate a process to a sub-process (e.g., eating involves chewing), to relate a region to a region it contains, relating portions of stuff, and so on. Those relations are fairly well established in the literature. What they do demand for, however, is clarity as to what those categories really are. For instance, with the process example, is that to be understood as Process as meant in the DOLCE ontology, or, say, Process in BFO? What if a foundational ontology does not have a category needed for a commonly used part-whole relation?

The first step to answer such questions was to assess several foundational ontologies on 1) which of the part-whole relations they have now, and which categories are present that are needed for the domain and range declarations for those common part-whole relations. I assessed that for DOLCE, BFO, GFO, SUMO, GIST, and YAMATO. This foundational ontology comparison is summarised in tables 1 and 2 in the paper that emanated from the assessment [2], entitled “A note on the compatibility of part-whole relations with foundational ontologies” that I recently presented at FOUST-II: 2nd Workshop on Foundational Ontology, Joint Ontology Workshops 2017 in Bolzano, Italy. In short: none fits perfectly for various reasons, but there are more and less suitable ontologies for a possible alignment. DOLCE and SUMO were evaluated to have the best approximations. It appeared at the workshops presentation’s Q&A session, where two of the DOLCE developers were present, that the missing Collective was an oversight, or: the ontology is incomplete and it was not an explicit design choice to exclude it. This, then, would make DOLCE the best/easiest fit.

I’ll save you the trials and tribulations creating the orchestrated OWL files. The part-whole relations, their inverses, and their proper parthood versions were manually linked to modules of DOLCE and SUMO, and automatically linked to BFO and GFO. That was an addition of 49 relations (OWL object properties) and 121 logical axioms, which were then extended further with another 11 mereotopological relations and its 16 logical axioms. These files are accessible online directly here and also listed with brief descriptions.

While there is something usable now and, by design at least, these files are reusable as well, what it also highlighted is that there are still some outstanding questions, as there already were for the top-level categories of previously aligned foundational ontologies [3]. For instance, some categories seem the same, but they’re in ‘incompatible’ parts of the taxonomy (located in disjoint branches), so then either not the same after all, or this happened unintentionally. Only GIST has been updated recently, and it may be useful if the others foundational ontologies were to be as well, so as to obtain clarity on these issues. The full interaction of part-whole relations with classical mereology is not quite clear either: there are various extensions and deviations, such as specifically for portions [4,5], but one for processes may be interesting as well. Not that such prospective theories would be usable as-is in OWL ontology development, but there are more expressive languages that start having tooling support where it could be an interesting avenue for future work. I’ll write more about the latter in an upcoming post (covering the K-CAP 2017 paper that was recently accepted).

On a last note: the Joint Ontology Workshops (JOWO 2017) was a great event. Some 100 ontologists from all over the world attended. There were good presentations, lively conversations, and it was great to meet up again with researchers I had not seen for years, finally meet people I knew only via email, and make new connections. It will not be an easy task to surpass this event next year at FOIS 2018 in Cape Town.

References

[1] Keet, C.M., Artale, A. Representing and Reasoning over a Taxonomy of Part-Whole Relations. Applied Ontology, 2008, 3(1-2):91-110.

[2] Keet, C.M. A note on the compatibility of part-whole relations with foundational ontologies. FOUST-II: 2nd Workshop on Foundational Ontology, Joint Ontology Workshops 2017, 21-23 September 2017, Bolzano, Italy. CEUR-WS Vol. (in print)

[3] Khan, Z.C., Keet, C.M. Foundational ontology mediation in ROMULUS. Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management: IC3K 2013 Selected Papers. A. Fred et al. (Eds.). Springer CCIS vol. 454, pp. 132-152, 2015. preprint

[4] Donnelly, M., Bittner, T. Summation relations and portions of stuff. Philosophical Studies, 2009, 143, 167-185.

[5] Keet, C.M. Relating some stuff to other stuff. 20th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW’16). Blomqvist, E., Ciancarini, P., Poggi, F., Vitali, F. (Eds.). Springer LNAI vol. 10024, 368-383. 19-23 November 2016, Bologna, Italy.

# Figuring out the verbalisation of temporal constraints in ontologies and conceptual models

Temporal conceptual models, ontologies, and their logics are nothing new, but that sort of information and knowledge representation still doesn’t gain a lot of traction (cf. say, formal methods for verification). This is in no small part because modelling temporal information is not easy. Several conceptual modelling languages do have various temporal extensions, but most modellers don’t even use all of the default language features yet [1]. How could one at least reduce the barrier to adoption of temporal logics and modelling languages? The two principle approaches are visualisation with a diagrammatic language and rendering it in a (pseudo-)natural language. One of my postgraduate students looked at the former, trying to figure out what would be the best icons and such, which showed there was still a steep learning curve [2]. Before examining whether that could be optimised, I wondered whether the natural language option might be promising. The problem was, that no-one had yet tried to determine what the natural language counterpart of the temporal constraints were supposed to be, let alone whether they be ‘adequate’ or the ‘best’ way of rendering the temporal constraints in tolerable natural language sentences. I wanted to know that badly enough that I tried to find out.

Given that using templates is a tried-and-tested relatively successful approach for atemporal conceptual models and ontologies (e.g., for ORM, the ACE system), it makes sense to do something similar, but then for some temporal extension. As temporal conceptual modelling language I used one that has a Description Logics foundation (DLRUS [3,4]) for that easily links to ontologies as well, added a few known temporal constraints (like for relationships/DL roles, mandatory) and removing others (some didn’t seem all that interesting), which resulted in 34 constraints, still. For each one, I tried to devise more and less reasonable templates, resulting in 101 templates overall. Those templates were evaluated on semantics and preference by three temporal logic experts and five ‘mixed experts’ (experts in natural language generation, logic, or modelling). This resulted in a final set of preferred templates to verbalise the temporal constraints. The remainder of this post first describes a bit about the templates and then the results of which I think they are most interesting.

Templates

The basic idea of a template—in the context of the verbalisation of conceptual models and ontologies—is to have some natural language for the constraint where then the vocabulary gets slotted in at runtime. Take, for instance, simple named class subsumption in an ontology, $C \sqsubseteq D$, for which one could define a template “Each [C] is a(n) [D]”, so that with some axiom $Manager \sqsubseteq Employee$, it would generate the sentence “Each Manager is an Employee”. One also could have devised the template “All [C] are [D]” and then it would have generated “All Managers are Employees”. The choice between the two templates in this case is just taste, for in both cases, the semantics is the same. More complex axioms are not always that straightforward. For instance, for the axiom type $C \sqsubseteq \exists R.D$, would “Each [C] [R] some [D]” be good enough, or would perhaps “Each [C] must [R] at least one [D]” be better? E.g., “Each Professor teaches some Course” vs “Each Professor must teach at least one Course”.

The same can be done for the temporal constraints. To get there, I did a bit of a linguistic detour that informed the template design (described in the paper [5]). Let us take as first example for templates temporal class that has a semantics of $o \in C^{\mathcal{I}(t)} \rightarrow \exists t' \neq t. o \notin C^{\mathcal{I}(t')}$; for instance, UndergraduateStudent (assuming they graduate and end up as alumni or as drop outs, and weren’t undergrads from birth):

1. If an object is an instance of entity type [C], then there is some time where it is not a(n) [C].
2. [C] is an entity type whose objects are, for some time in their existence, not instances of [C].
3. [C] is an entity type of which each object is not a(n) [C] for some time during its existence.
4. All instances of entity type [C] are not a(n) [C] for some time.
5. Each [C] is not a(n) [C] for some time.
6. Each [C] is for some time not a(n) [C].

Which one(s) do you think captures the semantics, and which one(s) do you prefer?

A more elaborate constraint for relationships is ‘dynamic extension for relationships, past, mandatory], which is formalised as $\langle o , o' \rangle \in \mbox{{\sc RDexM}-}_{R_1,R_2}^{\mathcal{I}(t)} \rightarrow (\langle o , o' \rangle \in{\tt R_1}^{\mathcal{I}(t)} \rightarrow \exists t' where $\langle o , o' \rangle \in \mbox{{\sc RDex}}_{R_1,R_2}^{\mathcal{I}(t)} \rightarrow ( \langle o , o' \rangle \in{\tt R_1}^{\mathcal{I}(t)} \rightarrow \exists t'>t. \langle o , o' \rangle \in {\tt R_2}^{\mathcal{I}(t')})$.; e.g., every passenger who boards a flight must have checked in for that flight. Two options could be:

1. Each ..C_1.. ..R_1.. ..C_2.. was preceded by ..C_1.. ..R_2.. ..C_2.. some time earlier.
2. Each ..C_1.. ..R_1.. ..C_2.. must be preceded by ..C_1.. ..R_2.. ..C_2.. .

I’m not saying they are all correct; they were some of the options given, which the participants could choose from and comment on. The full list of constraints and template options are available in the supplementary material, which also contains a file where you can fill in your own answers, see what the (anonymised) participants said, and it has the final list of ‘best’ constraints.

Results

The main aggregate quantitative results are shown in the following table.

Many observations can be made from the data (see the paper for details). Some of the salient aspects are that there was low inter-annotator agreement among the experts, despite that they know each other (temporal logics is a small community) and that the ‘mixed group’ deemed many sentences correct that the experts deemed wrong in the sense of not properly capturing the semantics of the constraint. Put differently, it looks like the mixed experts, as a group, did not fully grasp some subtle distinction in the temporal constraints.

With respect to the templates, the preferred ones don’t follow the structure of the logic, but are, in a way, a separate rendering, or: there’s no neat 1:1 mapping between axiom type and template structure. That said, that doesn’t mean that they always chose the shortest template: the experts definitely did not, while the mixed experts leaned a bit toward preferring templates with fewer words even though they were surely not always the semantically correct option.

It may not look good that the experts preferred different templates, but in a follow-up interview with one of the experts, the expert noted that it was not really a problem “for there is the logic that does have the precise meaning anyway” and thus “resolves any confusion that may arise from using slightly different terminology”. The temporal logic expert does have a point from the expert’s view, fair enough, but that pretty much defeats my aim with the experiment. Asking more non-experts may not be a good strategy either, for they are, on average, too lenient.

So, for now, we do have a set of, relatively, ‘best’ templates to verbalise temporal constraints in temporal conceptual models and ontologies. The next step is to compare that with the diagrammatic representation. This we did [6], and I’ll describe those results informally in a next post.

I’ll present more details at the upcoming CREOL: Contextual Representation of Events and Objects in Language Workshop that is part of the Joint Ontology Workshops 2017, which will be held next week (21-23 September) in Bolzano, Italy. As the KRDB group at FUB in Bolzano has a few temporal logic experts, I’m looking forward to the discussions! Also, I’d be happy if you would be willing to fill in the spreadsheet with your preferences (before looking at the answers given by the participants!), and send them to me.

References

[1] Keet, C.M., Fillottrani, P.R. An analysis and characterisation of publicly available conceptual models. 34th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER’15). Johannesson, P., Lee, M.L. Liddle, S.W., Opdahl, A.L., Pastor López, O. (Eds.). Springer LNCS vol 9381, 585-593. 19-22 Oct, Stockholm, Sweden.

[2] T. Shunmugam. Adoption of a visual model for temporal database representation. M. IT thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town, South Africa, 2016.

[3] A. Artale, E. Franconi, F. Wolter, and M. Zakharyaschev. A temporal description logic for reasoning about conceptual schemas and queries. In S. Flesca, S. Greco, N. Leone, and G. Ianni, editors, Proceedings of the 8th Joint European Conference on Logics in Artificial Intelligence (JELIA-02), volume 2424 of LNAI, pages 98-110. Springer Verlag, 2002.

[4] A. Artale, C. Parent, and S. Spaccapietra. Evolving objects in temporal information systems. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, 50(1-2):5-38, 2007.

[5] Keet, C.M. Natural language template selection for temporal constraints. CREOL: Contextual Representation of Events and Objects in Language, Joint Ontology Workshops 2017, 21-23 September 2017, Bolzano, Italy. CEUR-WS Vol. (in print).

[6] Keet, C.M., Berman, S. Determining the preferred representation of temporal constraints in conceptual models. 36th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER’17). Springer LNCS. 6-9 Nov 2017, Valencia, Spain. (in print)

# Round 2 of the search engine, browser, and language bias mini-experiment

Exactly a year ago I did a mini-experiment to see whether search engine bias exist in South Africa as well. It did. The notable case was that Google in English on Safari on the Mac (GES) showed results for ‘politically interesting searches’ that had less information and was leaning to the right-side of the political spectrum in a way that raised cause for concern, as compared to Google in isiZulu in Firefox (GiF) and Bing in English in Firefox (BEF). I repeated the experiment in the exact same way, with some of the same queries and a few more new ones that take into account current affairs; the only difference being using my Internet connection at home rather than at work. The same problem still exists, sometimes quite dramatically. As recommendation, then: don’t use Google in English on Safari on the Mac unless you want to be in an “anti-government Democratic Alliance as centre-of-the-world” bubble.

To back it all up, I took screenshots again, with the order fltr GiF, GES, BEF, so you can check for yourself what users with different configurations see on the first page of the search results. The set of clearly different/biased results are listed first.

• EFF”, which in South Africa is a left populist opposition party, and internationally the abbreviation of the electronic frontier foundation:

“EFF” search

GiF lists it as political party; GES in relation to the DA first and then as political party; BEF as political party and electronic frontier foundation.

• jacob zuma”, the current president of the country: GiF first has a google ad to oust zuma, then general info and news; GES with a google ad to oust zuma, comment by JZ’s son

“jacob zuma” search

blaming the whites (probably fuelling racial divisiveness), then general info and news; BEF has general info and news.

• ANC”, currently the largest political party nationally and in power: GiF has first a link to ANC site, one

“ANC” search

news, and for the rest contact info; GES has first ‘bad press’ for the ANC as top stories, then twitter, then the ANC website; BEF lists first the ANC site, then news and info.

• Manana”, who is the Higher Education deputy minister who faces allegations of mistreatment by female

“Manana” search

staff members in his department: GiF with news about the accusations; GES has negative news about the ANC women’s league and DA actions; BEF shows info about Manana and mixed it up with the Spanish mañana.

• The autocomplete function when typing “ANC” was somewhat surprising: GiF also associates it with ‘eff news’, and ‘zuma’;

exploring the autocomplete on “ANC”

GES doesn’t have ‘eff news’ to suggest, so autocomplete also seems to be determined by the client-side configuration; BEF has all sorts of things.

• white monopoly capital” (long story): GiF shows general info and news; GES also shows general info

“white monopoly capital” search

and news, but with that inciting blaming the whites news item; BEF shows general info and news as well, but differently ordered from Google’s result.

• DA”, which in South Africa refers to the abbreviation of the Democratic Alliance opposition party

“DA” search

(capitalist, for the rich): GiF lists the DA website and some news; GES shows news on DA action and opinion, then the DA website; BEF lists the DA site, some general info and disambiguation.

• motion of no confidence”, which was held last week against Jacob Zuma

“motion of no confidence” search

(the motion failed, but not by a large margin): GiF has again that Google ad for the organization to oust Zuma, then info and mostly news (with 1 international news site [Al Jazeera]); GES has info then SA opinion pieces rather than news; BEF has news and info.

• FeesMustFall”, which was one of the tags of the student protests in 2015

“FeesMustFall” search

and 2016 (for free higher education): GiF has general info and news; GES shows first two ads to join the campaign, then general info and news; BEF has info and news. So, this seems flipped cf. last year.

Then the set of searches of which the results are roughly the same. I had expected this for “Law on cookies in South Africa” and “Socialism”, for they were about the same last year as well. I wasn’t sure about “women’s month” (this month, August), given its history; there are slight differences, but not much. The interesting one, perhaps, was that “state capture gupta” also showed similar results across the three configurations, all of them showing results to pages that treat it as fact and at least some detailed background reading on it.

“Law on cookies in South Africa” search

“Socialism” search

“women’s month” search

“state capture gupta” search

Finally, last year the mini-experiment was motivated by lecture preparations for the “Social Issues and Professional Practice” block of CSC1016S that I’m scheduled to teach in the upcoming semester (if there won’t be protests, that is). As compared to last year, now I can also add a note on the Algorithmic Transparency and Accountability statement from the ACM, in addition to the ‘filter bubble’ and ‘search engine manipulation’ items. Maybe I should cook up an exercise for the students so we can get data rather still being in the realm of anecdotes with my 20 searches and three configurations. If you did the same with a different configuration, please let me know.

# A grammar of the isiZulu verb (present tense)

If you have read any of the blog posts on (automated) natural language generation for isiZulu, then you’ll probably agree with me that isiZulu verbs are non-trivial. True, verbs in other languages are most likely not as easy as in English, or Afrikaans for that matter (e.g., they made irregular verbs regular), but there are many little ‘bits and pieces’ ‘glued’ onto the verb root that make it semantically a ‘heavy’ element in a sentence. For instance:

• Aba-shana ba-ya-zi-theng-is-el-an-a                izimpahla
• ‘The children are selling the clothes to each other’

The ba is the subject concord (~conjugation) to match with the noun class (which is 2) of the noun that plays the subject in the sentence (abashana), the ya denotes a continuous action (‘are doing something’ in the present), the zi is the object concord for the noun class (8) of the noun that plays the object in the sentence (izimpahla), theng is the verb root, then comes the CARP extension with is the causative (turning ‘buy’ into ‘sell’), and el the applicative and an the reciprocative, which take care of the ‘to each other’, and then finally the final vowel a.

More precisely, the general basic structure of the verb is as follows:

where NEG is the negative; SC the subject concord; T/A denotes tense/aspect; MOD the mood; OC the object concord; Verb Rad the verb radical; C the causative; A the applicative; R the reciprocal; and P the passive. For instance, if the children were not selling the clothes to each other, then instead of the SC, there would be the NEG SC in that position, making the verb abayazithengiselana.

To make sense of all this in a way that it would be amenable to computation, we—my co-author Langa Khumalo and I—specified the grammar of the complex verb for the present tense in a CFG using an incremental process of development. To the best of our (and the reviewer’s) knowledge, the outcome of the lengthy exercise is (1) the first comprehensive and precisely formulated documentation of the grammar rules for the isiZulu verb present tense, (2) all together in one place (cf. fragments sprinkled around in different papers, Wikipedia, and outdated literature (Doke in 1927 and 1935)), and (3) goes well beyond handling just one of the CARP, among others. The figure below summarises those rules, which are explained in detail in the forthcoming paper “Grammar rules for the isiZulu complex verb”, which will be published in the Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies [1] (finally in print, yay!).

It is one thing to write these rules down on paper, and another to verify whether they’re actually doing what they’re supposed to be doing. Instead of fallible and laborious manual checking, we put them in JFLAP (for the lack of a better alternative at the time; discussed in the paper) and tested the CFG both on generation and recognition. The tests went reasonably well, and it helped fixing a rule during the testing phase.

Because the CFG doesn’t take into account phonological conditioning for the vowels, it generates strings not in the language. Such phonological conditioning is considered to be a post-processing step and was beyond the scope of elucidating and specifying the rules themselves. There are other causes of overgeneration that we did not get around to doing, for various reasons: there are rules that go across the verb root, which are simple to represent in coding-style notation (see paper) but not so much in a CFG, and rules for different types of verbs, but there’s no available resource that lists which verb roots are intransitive, which as monosyllabic and so on. We have started with scoping rules and solving issues for the latter, and do have a subset of phonological conditioning rules; so, to be continued… For now, though, we have completed at least one of the milestones.

Last, but not least, in case you wonder what’s the use of all this besides the linguistics to satisfy one’s curiosity and investigate and document an underresourced language: natural language generation for intelligent user interfaces in localised software, spellcheckers, and grammar checkers, among others.

References

[1] Keet, C.M., Khumalo, L. Grammar rules for the isiZulu complex verb. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, (in print). Submitted version (the rules are the same as in the final version)

# Aligning different relations: the case of part-whole relations—LDK2017

Despite the best intentions, I did not get around to writing a post on the paper that I presented last week at the First International Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge 2017, 19-20 June, Galway, Ireland, and now Paul Groth also ‘beat’ me to it writing a nice conference report of it. On the bright side, it is an opportunity to say upfront I really enjoyed the conference and look forward to the next edition in 2019. The ESWC’17 organisers might be slightly disappointed that there was no special track on the multilingual semantic web after all, but I did get the distinct impression that the LDK17 authors might just all have gambled on LDK17—an opportunity to binge two days on all things natural language & Semantic Web—rather than on one track at an overpriced conference (despite the allure of it being A-rated).

So, what was my paper about that could have been submitted to either? I ended up struggling—and solving—an issue with aligning OWL object properties that were not simple 1:1 mappings, in a similar scope as our ESWC17 paper (introduced here) [4], but then with too many complications. Complications were due to the different conceptualisations of part-whole relations and that one of the requirements was to solve what to do with an object property (relation, relationship) that does not have a neat, single, label, and therewith neither fitting with the common OWL modelling paradigm nor with the recently agreed-upon ontolex-lemon model for linguistic annotations.

The start of all this sounded nice and doable: we need to generate natural language for healthcare, using, e.g., SNOMED CT, in local languages in South Africa, focussing on the largest one, being isiZulu. Medical terminologies are riddled with part-whole relations, so we sought to address that one (simple existentials already having been solved), availing of a standard list of part-whole relations (e.g. [1]). That turned out to be a non-trivial exercise, but doable eventually [2]. What wasn’t addressed in [2] was that some ‘common’ part-whole relations, such as membership and containment, weren’t like that in isiZulu, at all. Moreover, it wasn’t just a language issue, but ontological as well. The LDK17 paper “Representing and aligning similar relations: parts and wholes in isiZulu vs English” [3] describes this in some detail.

Here’s a (simplified) list of (assumed to be) common part-whole relations, which takes into account both transitivity differences and domain and range:

Now here’s the one based on the isiZulu language and some ontological analysis of that:

That is: there are both generalisations—some distinctions are not being made—and specialisations—some distinctions are made here but not elsewhere. For instance, ‘musician is part of some orchestra’ and ‘heart is part of some human’ (or vv.) is all done and described in the same way (ingxenye ‘part of’ and SC+CONJ for ‘has part’ [more about that below]). Yet, there is a difference between an individual (e.g., a voter) participating in some process and a collective (e.g., the electorate) participating in a process, or vv. The paper describes this more precisely, going into some detail regarding the differences in categories of domain and range and into the consequences on transitivity of mereological parthood.

The other ‘odd thing’—cf. current multilingual Semantic Web assumptions and technologies, that is—is that while the conceptualisation of ‘has part’ exists, it does not have a single label as in English (or in several other languages, such as heeft as deel), but it is dependent on the noun class of the noun of the class that play the part and play the whole in the relation. It combines the subject concord (~conjugation) of the noun class of the noun that plays the whole with a conjunction that is phonologically conditioned based on the first letter of the noun that plays the part; with verbalisation in the plural and three phonological cases, there are 18 possible strings all denoting ‘has part’. This still could be sorted with a language with inverses, provided the part-of direction has a name, like the ingxenye. This is not the case for containment, however. Instead of the relation (object property) having a name—be this a verb like ‘contained in’ or some noun phrase—it is the noun that plays the whole (the container, if you will) that gets modified. For instance, imvilophu ‘envelope’ and emvilophini denoting ‘contained in the envelope’, or, for individuals and locations, the city iTheku ‘Durban’ and eThekwini meaning ‘located in Durban’ (no typo—there’s some phonological conditioning I’m brushing over). While I have gotten used to such constructions, it generated some surprise among several attendees that one can have notions, concepts, views on or interpretations or descriptions of reality, that exist but do not have even one single string of text throughout to refer to regardless the context it is used.

The naming issue was solved by adding some arbitrary string as ‘name’ of the object property, and relating that to the function that verbalises that specific part-whole relation. The former issue, i.e., not all the same part-whole relations, required a bit more work, using ontology pattern alignments, by extending one correspondence pattern from the ODP catalogue and introducing a new one (see paper for the formal details), using the same broad framework of formalisation as proposed in [4].

All this was then implemented and aligned, and verified to not result in some unsatisfiable classes, object properties, or inconsistency (files). This also works in the isiZulu verbalisation tool we demo-ed at ESWC17 (described in the previous post) [5], all as part of the NRF-funded GeNI project.

Now, ideally, I already would have had the time to read the papers I flagged in my LDK17 conference notes with “check paper”. I haven’t yet due to end-of-semester tasks. So, on the basis of just a positive-seeming presentation, here are a few that are on the top of my list to check out first, for quite different reasons:

• Interaction between natural language reading capabilities and math education, focusing on language production (i.e., ‘can you talk about it?’) [6], mainly because math education in South Africa faces a lot of problems. It also generated a lively discussion in the Q&A session.
• The OnLiT ontology for linguistic [7] and LLODifying linguistic glosses [8] terminology (also: one of the two also won the best paper award).
• Deep text generation, for it was looking at trying to address skewed or limited data to learn from [9], which is an issue we face when trying to do some NLP with most South African languages.

References

[1] Keet, C.M., Artale, A. Representing and Reasoning over a Taxonomy of Part-Whole Relations. Applied Ontology, 2008, 3(1-2):91-110.

[2] Keet, C.M., Khumalo, L. On the verbalization patterns of part-whole relations in isiZulu. 9th International Natural Language Generation conference (INLG’16), September 5-8, 2016, Edinburgh, UK. ACL.

[3] Keet, C.M. Representing and aligning similar relations: parts and wholes in isiZulu vs English. In: Gracia J., Bond F., McCrae J., Buitelaar P., Chiarcos C., Hellmann S. (eds) Language, Data, and Knowledge LDK 2017. Springer LNAI vol 10318, 58-73.

[4] Fillottrani, P.R., Keet, C.M. Patterns for Heterogeneous TBox Mappings to Bridge Different Modelling Decisions. 14th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC’17). Springer LNCS. Portoroz, Slovenia, May 28 – June 2, 2017.

[5] Keet, C.M. Xakaza, M., Khumalo, L. Verbalising OWL ontologies in isiZulu with Python. 14th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC’17). Springer LNCS. Portoroz, Slovenia, May 28 – June 2, 2017. (demo paper)

[6] Crossley, S., Kostyuk, V. Letting the genie out of the lamp: using natural language processing tools to predict math performance. In: Gracia J., Bond F., McCrae J., Buitelaar P., Chiarcos C., Hellmann S. (eds) Language, Data, and Knowledge LDK 2017. Springer LNAI vol 10318, 330-342.

[7] Klimek, B., McCrae, J.P., Lehmann, C., Chiarcos, C., Hellmann, S. OnLiT: and ontology for linguistic terminology. In: Gracia J., Bond F., McCrae J., Buitelaar P., Chiarcos C., Hellmann S. (eds) Language, Data, and Knowledge LDK 2017. Springer LNAI vol 10318, 42-57.

[8] Chiarcos, C., Ionov, M. Rind-Pawlowski, M., Fäth, C., Wichers Schreur, J., Nevskaya. I. LLODifying linguistic glosses. In: Gracia J., Bond F., McCrae J., Buitelaar P., Chiarcos C., Hellmann S. (eds) Language, Data, and Knowledge LDK 2017. Springer LNAI vol 10318, 89-103.

[9] Dethlefs N., Turner A. Deep Text Generation — Using Hierarchical Decomposition to Mitigate the Effect of Rare Data Points. In: Gracia J., Bond F., McCrae J., Buitelaar P., Chiarcos C., Hellmann S. (eds) Language, Data, and Knowledge LDK 2017. Springer LNAI vol 10318, 290-298.

# Our ESWC17 demos: TDDonto2 and an OWL verbaliser for isiZulu

Besides the full paper on heterogeneous alignments for 14th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC’17) that will take place next week in Portoroz, Slovenia, we also managed to squeeze out two demo papers. You may already know of TDDonto2 with Kieren Davies and Agnieszka Lawrynowicz, which was discussed in an earlier post that has been updated with a tutorial video. It now has a demo paper as well [1], which describes the rationale and a few scenarios. The other demo, with Musa Xakaza and Langa Khumalo, is new-new, but the regular reader might have seen it coming: we finally managed to link the verbalisation patterns for certain Description Logic axiom types [2,3] to those in OWL ontologies. The tool takes as input an ontology in isiZulu and the verbalisation algorithms, and out come the isiZulu sentences, be this in plain text for further processing or in a GUI for inspection by a domain expert [4]. There is a basic demo-screencast to show it’s all working.

The overall architecture may be of interest, for it deviates from most OWL verbalisers. It is shown in the following figure:

For instance, we use the Python-based OWL API Owlready, rather than a Java-based app, for Python is rather popular in NLP and the verbalisation algorithms may be used elsewhere as well. We made more such decisions with the aim to make whatever we did as multi-purpose usable as possible, like the list of nouns with noun classes (surprisingly, and annoyingly, there is no such readily available list yet, though isizulu.net probably will have it somewhere but inaccessible), verb roots, and exceptions in pluralisation. (Problems for integrating the verbaliser with, say, Protégé will be interesting to discuss during the demo session!)

The text-based output doesn’t look as nice as the GUI interface, so I will show here only the GUI interface, which is adorned with some annotations to illustrate that those verbalisation algorithms in the background are far from trivial templates:

For instance, while in English the universal quantification is always ‘Each’ or ‘All’ regardless the named class quantified over, in isiZulu it depends on the noun class of the noun that is the name of the OWL class. For instance, in the figure above, izingwe ‘leopards’ is in noun class 10, so the ‘Each/All’ is Zonke, amavazi ‘vases’ is in noun class 6, so ‘Each/All’ then becomes Onke, and abantu ‘people’/’humans’ is in noun class 2, making Bonke. There are 17 noun classes. They also determine the subject concords (SC, alike conjugation) for the verbs, with zi- for noun class 10, ­a- for noun class 6, and ba- for noun class 2, to name a few. How this all works is described in [2,3]. We’ve implemented all those algorithms and integrated the pluraliser [5] in it to make it work. The source files are available to check and play with already, you can do so and ask us during the ESWC17 demo session, and/or also have a look at the related outputs of the NRF-funded project Grammar Engine for Nguni natural language interfaces (GeNi).

References

[1] Davies, K. Keet, C.M., Lawrynowicz, A. TDDonto2: A Test-Driven Development Plugin for arbitrary TBox and ABox axioms. Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC’17), Springer LNCS. Portoroz, Slovenia, May 28 – June 2, 2017. (demo paper)

[2] Keet, C.M., Khumalo, L. Toward a knowledge-to-text controlled natural language of isiZulu. Language Resources and Evaluation, 2017, 51:131-157.

[3] Keet, C.M., Khumalo, L. On the verbalization patterns of part-whole relations in isiZulu. 9th International Natural Language Generation conference (INLG’16), 5-8 September, 2016, Edinburgh, UK. Association for Computational Linguistics, 174-183.

[4] Keet, C.M. Xakaza, M., Khumalo, L. Verbalising OWL ontologies in isiZulu with Python. 14th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC’17). Springer LNCS. Portoroz, Slovenia, May 28 – June 2, 2017. (demo paper)

[5] Byamugisha, J., Keet, C.M., Khumalo, L. Pluralising Nouns in isiZulu and Related Languages. 17th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics (CICLing’16), Springer LNCS. April 3-9, 2016, Konya, Turkey.