Re: RDF: a suitable NLP KB representation (Was: Owning URIs (Was: Yet Another LOD cloud browser))

Hi Adrian,

NL generation from RDF instance data, very neat!! No, I don't think I ever
ran across this, but it is a topic I'm highly interested in, thanks so much
for the link.

-sherman

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 4:54 PM, Adrian Walker <adriandwalker@gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi Sherman --
>
> You may be interested in the system online at the site below.
>
> In particular, the approach in the example
>
>    www.reengineeringllc.com/demo_agents/RDFQueryLangComparison1.agent
>
> may be useful.
>
> Apologies if you have seen this before, and thanks for comments.
>
>                                                     -- Adrian
>
> Internet Business Logic
> A Wiki and SOA Endpoint for Executable Open Vocabulary English over SQL and
> RDF
> Online at www.reengineeringllc.com    Shared use is free
>
> Adrian Walker
> Reengineering
> Phone: USA 860 830 2085
>
>
> On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 4:32 PM, Sherman Monroe <sdmonroe@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> David said:
>>
>>
>>> I didn't quite express myself clearly. If you were to take the previous
>>> sentence ("I didn't quite express myself clearly"), and encode it in RDF,
>>> what would you get? It certainly is something that I said about "the thing",
>>> the thing being vaguely what I tried to explain before (how do you mint a
>>> URI for that?). The point is that using RDF or whatever other non-natural
>>> language structured data representation, you cannot practically represent
>>> "the things people say about the thing" in the majority of real-life cases.
>>> You can only express a very tiny subset of what can be said in natural
>>> language.
>>
>>
>> First off: I began as a NLP researcher seeking the holiest of holy-grails,
>> a method and accompaning knowledge representation formalism with enough
>> semantic rigor to encapsulate any NL statements or expression. What came out
>> of that work was the Cypher transcoder <http://cypher.monrai.com>. When I
>> was first intro'd to the RDF (circa 1999), and when I saw the triple format,
>> it reminded me of predicate calculus (which in my opinion failed the above
>> criteria), and so I turned my noise up at it (and called TimBL a *lunatic
>> * if I recall), and decided to just work on the NL processing side (i.e.
>> extracting semantics from NL phrase structure) and shelf the knowledge
>> representation side 'til later (i.e. how to serialize the semantics once
>> extracted). Then four years or so later (circa 2003), I made enough headway
>> on the input processing side to turn attention again to the output/knowledge
>> representation side. That's when I was turned on to Frame Semantics, which I
>> immediately praised, it is by far the most expressive and elegant knowledge
>> representation framework for NL I have come across (although, it's been 3 or
>> 4 years since I really looked). In short, frame semantics sees all sentences
>> as a "scene" (like a movie scene) and the nouns all play "roles" in that
>> scene. E.g. a boy eating is involved in a ConsumeFood scene, and the actors
>> are the boy, the utensil he uses, the food, the chair he sits in. So I
>> choose framesemantics as the KB model for Cypher grammar parser output.
>>
>> This sent off lightbulbs for me, I went back to RDF, and saw that, low and
>> behold, frames can be represented as RDF, the scene types being classes, a
>> scene instance (i.e. the thing representing a complete sentence) being the
>> subject, the property is the role, and the object is the thing playing that
>> role, e.g:
>>
>> EatFrame023  rdf:type  mlo:EatFrame
>> EatFrame023  mlo:eater  someschema:URIForJohn
>> EatFrame023  utensil  someschema:JohnFavoriteSpoon
>> EatFrame023  mlo:seatedAt  _:anonChair
>> EatFrame023  foaf:location  someschema:JohnsLivingRoom
>> EatFrame023  someschema:time  _:01122
>> EatFrame023  truthval  "false"^booleanValueType
>>
>> dbpedia:Heroes(Series) rdf:type dbpedia:TVShow
>> dbpedia:Heroes(Series) dbpedia:showtime _:01122
>>
>> _:01122 rdf:type types:TimeSpan
>> _:01122 types:startHour "20"^num:PositiveInteger
>> _:01122 types:startMinutes "00"^num:PositiveInteger
>> _:01122 types:endHour "21"^num:PositiveInteger
>> _:01122 types:endMinutes "00"^num:PositiveInteger
>> _:01122 types:timezone "EST"
>>
>> This says: *No, John didn't eat in a sandwich in a chair in his living
>> room using his favorite spoon, during the TV show Heroes*. Do you still
>> believe RDF is incapable of expressing complex NL statements?
>>
>> Second off: Even though RDF (when married with frame semantics) is capable
>> of expressing very complex NL sentences, it was never the intention of the
>> Semantic Web forerunners to create a framework for doing so, and I do not
>> believe that this capacity is nessassary to make RDF valuable. The question
>> RDF answers is fundamentally: *What happens if all the worlds databases
>> (e.g. Oracle, Mysql, etc databases out there) could be directly connected to
>> one another in a large global network, all sharing one massive, distributed
>> schema, and people were able to send queries to that network using a
>> Esperanto for SQL?* The ability of RDF to represent (not sentences but)
>> rows and columns of any database schema imaginable means it can deliver this
>> vision, and the value tied to it.
>>
>>
>>
>>> This affects how people conceptualize and use this medium. If I hear a
>>> URI on TV, would I be motivated enough to type it into some browser when
>>> what I get back looks like an engineering spec sheet, but worse--with
>>> different rows from different sources, forcing me to derive the big picture
>>> myself,
>>>   urn:sdajfdadjfai324829083742983:sherman_monroe
>>>      name: Sherman Monroe (according to foo.com)
>>>      age: __ (according to bar.com)
>>>      age: ___ (according to bar2.com)
>>>      nationality: __ (according to baz.com)
>>>      ...
>>> rather than, say, a natural language essay that conveys a coherent
>>> opinion, or a funny video?
>>>
>>
>>
>> Then it seems you're still not a convert :) As for me, your example here
>> has very obvious value. Remember what WWW did for humans and the huge
>> revolution that came with giving people access to what other people in the
>> world were saying no matter where in the world they were, and no matter what
>> langauge the host machine spoke natively. The SW is doing that all over
>> again... but for machines this time.
>>
>> User empowerment is a large external benefit of the SW, in WWW, webmaster
>> makes assumptions (sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly) about what data is
>> important and should be shown and how, in SW, user decides for his/herself.
>> Additionally, NL will play a big part of cleaning up the UI so that it
>> doesn't look like an enginerring schematic :) Again, I reference
>> razorbase <http://www.razorbase.com>. Notice the descriptions in the
>> breadcrumbs and descriptions of facets under the 'Your query' link.
>>
>>  -sherman
>>
>>
>


-- 

Thanks,
-sherman

I pray that you may prosper in all things and be healthy, even as your soul
prospers
(3 John 1:2)