Re: synsem module

Hi Philip,
i've just yet taken a look at your example, which is fine for me. In
particular I agree with the new positioning of the thematic roles.
yes, i think too that maybe my prior example with "destroy" was
questionable, but i've found a real example from PSC:

in PSC we have (among other) these two meanings for "allontanare"

USem6958allontanare, as in "allontanare il tavolo dal muro" (move the table
away from the wall)

USem79328allontanare, as in "allontanare i figli dalla madre" (estrange the
children from the mother)

with respectively two predicates (=semantic frames) and two different sets
of thematic roles:

PREDallontanare#1, agent, patient, location

PREDallontanare#4, agent, patient, underspecified

Nevertheless, they are both linked to one subcatframe "t-adjppda-xa" which
means transitive + prepositional clause with "da",

I don't know exactly what theory the lexicographers followed here for
assigning the thematic roles, but it is at least understandable that you
want to consider these two uses as the same from the syntactic behavior but
different from the semantic one, namely considering "the mother" in
PREDallontanare#4 as something other than a location.

Regards,

Francesca





2014-09-05 22:48 GMT+02:00 Philipp Cimiano <cimiano@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de>
:

>  Hi Francesca, all,
>
>  we discussed these points during the telco today. See my comments below...
>
> Have a good weekend,
>
> Philipp.
>
> Am 05.09.14 14:03, schrieb Francesca Frontini:
>
> Dear Philip, all,
> i've looked into the example and there are three main points that should
> be looked into, from my part:
>
>  1) the synsemFrame here is one for sell and buy, as in Philipps first
> example; following mine and Fahad's alternative example, could one also
> represent two synsemFrame objects, one for sell and one for buy, linked to
> the same ontological object? or would that force us to have two ontological
> events too?
>
>
> Yes, of course, there is some absolute flexibility here. One can use two
> different frames for sell and buy, referring to two different concepts or
> two frames pointing to one concept or one frame.
>
>
>  2) the synsemFrame is linked to the lexicalEntry, with (if im not
> mistaken) no direct or indirect connection to the sense.  This feels a bit
> wrong to me; when a verb has more than one sense, you want to be able to
> match correctly; couldn't one make it a property of the sense instead?
>
> Well, for sure there should be a link from the frame to the sense.
>
>
>  3) the thematic roles are on the synbehavior. I think that, especially
> for intransitive verbs one can think of cases where the subject may have
> different roles (in one case agent and in the other something else, like
> Force or Natural Cause, in some inventories). Intuitively, "John_agent
> destroyed the house_patient" and "The avalanche_cause destroyed the
> house_patient" have the same synbehavior, but  may correspond to a
> different sense and a different ontological event, have different
> selectional preferences and thematic role. How would one deal with this?
> Generally speaking Thematic Roles are considered at the interface of syntax
> and semantics rather than a syntactic phenomenon; hypothesis: couldn't they
> somewhat be linked to the synsem:argBinding?
>
> This is a good question indeed. The main issue is whether you assume that
> the two uses of destroy you cite above correspond to one Frame or not.
> In any case, we discussed during the telco today that in LMF they would be
> modelled as two different PredicativeRepresentations. In this case, using
> the mechnisms to reifiy argument bindings (synSemCorrespondence and
> synSemArgMapping) one can assign different thematic roles to the subject
> position.
>
> In any case, I have attached a new example (example11.ttl) that shows how
> to capture your example using the standard mechanisms in ontolex.owl and
> synsem.owl (without frames as used in my recent examples). Maybe we can
> start from there to analyze if you see any shortcomings in the modeling.
>
> One coneptual drawback I see is that to capture the different frames, two
> different sense object would be needed in order to capture that in one
> sense the subject expresses the destroyer while in the other case the
> subject expresses the cause of destroyment.
>
> Note that in my example I have attached the thematic role to the subsense
> which in some sense realizes the synsem arg mapping for a particular frame
> element of a frame so to speak.
>
> I hope that this makes sense to you.
>
> However, it is certainly questionable that two senses (with four
> subsenses) are needed, while both uses of "destroy" seem to correspond to
> the same sense, I agree. This might indeed call for introducing something
> like a SemanticPredicate that is related to the sense. In the case above we
> could thus have one sense but two semantic predicates.
>
>
>  Hope I can be there this afternoon, otherwise i'll read you from the
> thread.
>
>  Cheers from Paris,
> Francesca
>
>
> 2014-09-04 17:04 GMT+02:00 Fahad Khan <anasfkhan81@gmail.com>:
>
>> Dear Philipp and list,
>>
>>  Thanks for the example, I will go through it this afternoon.
>>
>>  Francesca has told me she probably won't be able to make it tomorrow,
>> but, unexpected circumstances aside, I will be there.
>>
>>
>>
>>  Cheers,
>>  Fahad
>>
>>
>> On 4 September 2014 14:04, Philipp Cimiano <
>> cimiano@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de> wrote:
>>
>>>  Hi Fahad, Francesca, all,
>>>
>>>  I attach a new version of example10.ttl (see also GIT).
>>>
>>> I have tried to merge the proposals of Fahad/Francesca with my proposal
>>> at the same time trying to remain as compact as possible.
>>>
>>> It would be great if we could discuss this example at the telco tomorrow.
>>>
>>> In particular, I would like to know whether these is any information
>>> that was in your example (Fahad and Francesca) that is not in mine.
>>>
>>> I will send out access details for the telco in a few minutes.
>>>
>>> Talk to you tomorrow.
>>>
>>> Philipp.
>>>
>>> Am 29.08.14 11:35, schrieb Fahad Khan:
>>>
>>>  Hi everyone
>>>
>>> Here are a few responses to John and Philipp’s comments. Hopefully we
>>> can discuss these further in the call and afterwards in the list too. One
>>> thing I would like to point out at the start is that even though the emails
>>> are being sent out under my (Fahad’s) name and I’m doing the majority of
>>> the typing most of the work on the model is Francesca’s.  Hopefully in
>>> the call today most of the explanation will be her's too :)
>>>
>>> Our main motivation here is our resistance to stripping all semantics
>>> from the lexicon part especially with respect to the conversion of legacy
>>> resources. In principle we agree with a lot of John &  Philipp’s
>>> remarks that go in the direction of preserving semantics by reference. But
>>> it is difficult to see how this impacts us, as people who have a legacy
>>> resource (such as Parole Simple Clips) and want to use the ontolex model to
>>> publish it.
>>>
>>> Practically speaking we don’t know what to do with the PSC semantic
>>> layer. On the one hand Philip reminds us that Ontolex deals primarily with
>>> "given" ontologies. That leaves our semantic layer out. As you know we
>>> have tried to be faithful to the idea of semantics by reference in
>>> converting PSC using lemon; but we also wanted to publish all the semantics
>>> of PSC; this forced us to create a new ontological level to accommodate our
>>> semantic layer.
>>>
>>> But this to be honest is not really a well formed ontology, and can
>>> hardly be pointed to by other lexicons (other languages...) without a lot
>>> of manual checking. This is not what we want... we want ontologies that are
>>> reusable even independently from the original lexicon.
>>>
>>> Our concern is that people with a legacy resource, are just going to
>>> choose the easy way, use the "lexical" basics of the model, like the
>>> lexical entry, the canonical form.... and then add/define their semantic
>>> stuff on top of it, as an extension to the lexical model, that is without
>>> using "reference" to an ontology. Basically they'll add their semantic
>>> layer the way they want it.
>>>
>>> Nevertheless, for the sake of the argument, why don't we take a resource
>>> of some complexity and try to see how it accomodates in your best model in
>>> a way that is really faithful to the ontolex philosophy, and at the same
>>> time leaving as little information out as possible.
>>>
>>> We are thinking of completing Parole Simple Clips, as a test case for
>>> this, but it's a big beast. We have started to do this, but when you tackle
>>> the verbs and the predicates, it's even more complex. Maybe this will give
>>> us an idea of how much adjustment legacy resources would require to be
>>> faithful to the "semantics by reference"  model, and how reusable the stuff
>>> that ends up on the ontological side.
>>> Cheers,
>>> Fahad & Francesca
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>  On 29 August 2014 08:34, Philipp Cimiano <
>>> cimiano@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de> wrote:
>>>
>>>>  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>
>>>> 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> 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>
>>>>>> 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> 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>:
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> 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
>>>>>>>> Fax: +49 521 106 6560
>>>>>>>> Mail: 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
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> --
>>> 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
>>>
>>>
>>
>
> --
> --
> 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
>
>