Re: synsem module

Dear Fahad, all,

  I finally had the chance to look at your proposal in more detail, I 
think it is more in line than we might expect at first sight with the 
example that I provided a few weeks ago. I attach the example again for 
the sake of easier reference. In particular, I think that:

1) The *PredicativeRepresentation*s you are proposing corresponds to the 
*SemanticFrame*s that I was proposing. It sort of represents "the 
complex predicate expressed by a lexical entry", where the atomic parts 
come from a given ontology. Our proposals differ in that I was attaching 
the SemanticFrames to the SyntacticBehaviour via the relation 
"semFrame", then linking the frame to the sense. However, we can of 
course link the "sense" to the Frame as you propose and then link the 
Frame to the corresponding syntactic behaviour. Both are fine from my 
side. If you think your modelling here is better, then I have no problem 
in endorsing it.

2) As John mentioned, our building assumption is that predicates per se 
are *only* in the ontology. In this sense, the first decision to make is 
whether sell and buy denote the same concept in the ontology (lemon and 
myself are agnostic in this respect, this is a conceptual decision to 
make). The different perspectives you mention could be modelled by the 
SemanticFrame class that I was proposing, with different mappings 
between syntactic and semantic arguments. Information about semantic 
roles can be attached as annotations, that's not a problem. Further, the 
ontolex model allows you to have two different senses for sell and buy 
that nevertheless link to the same ontological class/predicate.

3) Note that ontolex was used to interface a lexicon with a given 
(domain) ontology, not a linguistic ontology. Agent / Themes / 
Beneficiary are linguistic roles rather than roles/relations that would 
appear in a (domain) ontology. As John mentions we can attach these 
roles to the syntactic arguments without a problem.

Let's discuss this further today. I will then try to create a new 
example that unifies both proposals, mine and Fahads.

talk to you later,

Philipp.

Am 28.08.14 15:01, schrieb John P. McCrae:
> Hi,
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 2:10 PM, Fahad Khan <anasfkhan81@gmail.com 
> <mailto:anasfkhan81@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Dear John,
>
>     Thanks for your comments.
>
>     We partly agree on your points, especially about the redundancy of
>     some modules. We want to use this LMF style treatment as a
>     starting point for further discussion.
>
>     As for the the use of reference for selectional preferences we can
>     see your point (maybe instead we can use a different relation such
>     as "domain" instead of "reference").
>
>     What we're still not sure about is the fact that predicates should
>     only be in the ontology: where the ontology in this case
>     represents the extensions of lexical items. The problem we have is
>     that for example, one can understand the senses of "buy" and
>     "sell" in this example to represent two different predicates but
>     just one class of "actions" (e.g., purchase_exchange_actions):
>     where the predicate represents a different "linguistically"
>     motivated way of looking at the same class of events.
>
>     If you want to make "buy" and "sell" one predicate as in the
>     Ontolex example that was given earlier on, i see practical as well
>     as theoretical problems. Practically, you force all those who have
>     two predicates in their resource to go and check which should be
>     merged.
>
> The question of whether to model buy and sell as a single event or as 
> two events that entail each other is an interesting question in 
> general, but it is a conceptual modelling issue, rather than a lexical 
> issue. As long as the lexicon can capture how each entry interfaces 
> with predicates defined in the ontology, such details of the lexical 
> modelling should not matter. It is also unavoidable that when dealing 
> with legacy resources, some work will be needed to harmonize with any 
> defined OntoLex model.
>
>
>     Also, what about semantic role labeling? the first argument of the
>     sell predicate is an agent according to PSC. So is the first
>     argument of the buy predicate.  It is because the same action is
>     conceptualized in different ways in language. But on the
>     ontological level, these different roles point to the same
>     participant in the action (eg. The buyer is beneficiary in one
>     case and agent in another).
>
>     Overall it seems to us there exists information related to
>     semantic predicates (as they are used in lexical resources we
>     know) which seems to pertain more to word use, and to the
>     linguistic rather than to the ontological level. But, we think
>     this would a good matter for discussion.
>
> Such linguistic features can be captured by annotations on the 
> arguments as required.
>
>
>     As for the SynSemCorrespondence, indeed it is verbose to
>     implement, but consider also that instead of having to laboriously
>     map lots of individual cases of syntactic and semantic arguments
>     you can just define a reified object that represents without
>     redundancy a whole class of such mappings. For instance in Parole
>     Simple Clips, you'd have thousands of instances all pointing to
>     one class of mappings, such as IsoTrivalent, or IsoBivalent. The
>     synsemcorrespondence object enables you to do this.
>
> As I said, the merging of the syntactic and semantic arguments as 
> proposed by /lemon/ is maximally efficient as it requires no extra 
> triples, it also has several other advantages, most notably it is 
> easier to query and work with.
>
> Regards,
> John
>
>
>
>     Cheers,
>     Francesca + Fahad
>
>
>     On 28 August 2014 12:19, John P. McCrae
>     <jmccrae@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de
>     <mailto:jmccrae@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de>> wrote:
>
>         Hi Fahad, Francesca, all,
>
>         I will not be at the telco tomorrow due to being busy at
>         Coling, but I will provide some comments on the proposal
>
>           * 'Predicates' should not be included in the modelling of
>             SynSem, as predicates are something clearly defined by the
>             ontology. A duplicate mechanism for semantics is not
>             needed in lemon/OntoLex as we have a good semantic model
>             (OWL) in contrast to a pure lexicon model like LMF, which
>             must define its own semantic model.
>           * I still have no clue what a 'predicative representation'
>             is... it seems entirely unnecessary in LMF, but perhaps I
>             am wrong here?
>           * Arguments cannot have references to an ontology, they
>             represent slots that should be filled in the logical
>             representation defined by the ontology. The proposal here
>             seems to confuse references with domains (that is the
>             class of object referenced by the argument rather than the
>             actual values referred to by the argument, when the frame
>             is realized).
>           * The SynSemCorrespondence object from LMF is frankly
>             verbose and unnecessarily so, it occupies 14 triples in
>             your proposal, where as direct linking of semantic and
>             syntactic arguments would take only 3 triples, and URI
>             reuse as in /lemon/ requires 0 triples! Is there any
>             justification for this complex and verbose modelling?
>
>         Regards,
>
>         John
>
>
>
>         On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 4:06 PM, Fahad Khan
>         <anasfkhan81@gmail.com <mailto:anasfkhan81@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>             Dear Philipp
>
>             We've tried to put our money where our mouth is so here is
>             a rough and ready version in RDF of the buy/sell example
>              as well as a diagram of part of the example, as inspired
>             by a more LMF type aproach:
>
>             https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dojqhFMHTswFWUarQAbeVo3ap6_UjDLyN9gTPydqr_g/edit
>
>             Cheers,
>
>             Fahad & Francesca
>
>
>             On 22 August 2014 10:37, Fahad Khan <anasfkhan81@gmail.com
>             <mailto:anasfkhan81@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>                 Dear Philipp,
>                 Sorry for the delay in responding,  we have been on
>                 holiday too the last couple of weeks.  We were
>                 planning to send something to the list before we went
>                 away, but it turns out the translation was harder to
>                 do than we thought (and our collective knowledge of
>                 lmf less comprehensive) and we weren't entirely happy
>                 with what we came up with.  However we will send you a
>                 slightly polished version of our proposed example next
>                 week before the telco -- after having hopefully
>                 discussed it with colleagues far more well versed in
>                 lmf than us.
>                 Cheers
>                 Fahad and Francesca
>
>                 Dear all,
>
>                    I returned from holidays end of last week. Given
>                 that some people are still on holidays, I propose we
>                 have our next telco on Friday 29th at the regular
>                 slot, i.e. 15:00 (CET). I will send out an
>                 announcement soon.
>
>                 @Fahad and Francesca: regarding our email thread
>                 before the holidays, would you please be so kind to
>                 send an example of the modelling of frames that is in
>                 your view appropriate, an LMF document would be fine
>                 for now so that we can study the LMF modelling in more
>                 detail in the next telco and then propose appropriate
>                 vocabulary elements in the synsem module to do the
>                 job. Starting from LMF seems a good idea to me as I
>                 mentione a few weeks ago.
>
>                 I will continue working with the vartrans and metadata
>                 modules from next week on until we receive the input
>                 form Fahad and Francesca to continue the work on the
>                 synsem module.
>
>                 I regard the ontolex and decomp modules as largely
>                 finished. Please check the ontologies and examples
>                 carefully so that we can soon agree to release them.
>
>                 Looking forward to continuing with our work.
>
>                 Best regards,
>
>                 Philipp.
>
>                 Am 02.08.14 18:46, schrieb Manuel Fiorelli:
>>                 Hi Philipp, All
>>
>>                 sorry for the delayed response, which is in fact
>>                 quite simple.  See below.
>>
>>                 2014-08-01 11:53 GMT+02:00 Philipp Cimiano
>>                 <cimiano@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de
>>                 <mailto:cimiano@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de>>:
>>
>>
>>                     Am 01.08.14 00:10, schrieb Manuel Fiorelli:
>>>                     My objection is that you split the description
>>>                     of the semantic frame into two blocks. In each
>>>                     block, you associated the frame with subframes,
>>>                     each one associating a semantic role with a
>>>                     syntactic argument. Having these two blocks, I
>>>                     can easily understand that the semantic frame
>>>                     has three roles, which maps to the syntactic
>>>                     arguments. Conversely, it I consider these two
>>>                     blocks together, as they are in reality, then I
>>>                     am not sure I can easily spot the "shape" of the
>>>                     semantic frame.
>>>
>>                     Yes, that is the only objection I can see so far
>>                     as well. Let's give a deeper look at this after
>>                     the holidays, ok?
>>
>>
>>                 I used the word "objection", which is quite a strong
>>                 word. Maybe "observation" would have been a better
>>                 choice. Nevertheless, I agree with you that we can
>>                 continue the discussion after the holidays.
>>
>>                 Meanwhile, happy holidays to everybody listening to
>>                 this thread, and the rest of the OntoLex community :-D
>
>                 -- 
>                 --
>                 Prof. Dr. Philipp Cimiano
>                 AG Semantic Computing
>                 Exzellenzcluster für Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC)
>                 Universität Bielefeld
>
>                 Tel:+49 521 106 12249  <tel:%2B49%20521%20106%2012249>
>                 Fax:+49 521 106 6560  <tel:%2B49%20521%20106%206560>
>                 Mail:cimiano@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de  <mailto:cimiano@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de>
>
>                 Office CITEC-2.307
>                 Universitätsstr. 21-25
>                 33615 Bielefeld, NRW
>                 Germany
>
>
>
>
>

-- 
--
Prof. Dr. Philipp Cimiano
AG Semantic Computing
Exzellenzcluster für Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC)
Universität Bielefeld

Tel: +49 521 106 12249
Fax: +49 521 106 6560
Mail: cimiano@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de

Office CITEC-2.307
Universitätsstr. 21-25
33615 Bielefeld, NRW
Germany