OWLSIZ: An isiZulu CNL for structured knowledge validation

Published in WebNLG, 2020

Recommended citation: Mahlaza et al. 2020

In iterative knowledge elicitation, engineers are expected to be directly involved in validating the already captured knowledge and obtaining new knowledge increments, thus making the process time consuming. Languages such as English have controlled natural languages than can be repurposed to generate natural language questions from an ontology in order to allow a domain expert to independently validate the contents of an ontology without understanding a ontology authoring language such as OWL. IsiZulu, South Africa’s main L1 language by number speakers, does not have such a resource, hence, it is not possible to build a verbaliser to generate such questions. Therefore, we propose an isiZulu controlled natural language, called OWL Simplified isiZulu (OWLSIZ), for producing grammatical and fluent questions from an ontology. Human evaluation of the generated questions showed that participants’ judgements agree that most (83%) questions are positive for grammaticality or understandability,

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Recommended citation: Zola Mahlaza and C. Maria Keet (2020). “OWLSIZ: An isiZulu CNL for structured knowledge validation” Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Natural Language Generation from the Semantic Web (WebNLG+), Dublin, Ireland (Virtual), 18 December 2020, pages 15–25