OWLSIZ: An isiZulu CNL for structured knowledge validation

C. Maria Keet
Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Natural Language Generation from the Semantic Web (WebNLG+), Dublin, Ireland (Virtual), 2020

Abstract

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 an 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.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{mahlaza-keet-2020-owlsiz,
    title     = "{OWLSIZ}: An {isiZulu} {CNL} for Structured Knowledge Validation",
    author    = "Mahlaza, Zola and Keet, C. Maria",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Natural Language Generation from the Semantic Web (WebNLG+)",
    month     = dec,
    year      = "2020",
    address   = "Dublin, Ireland (Virtual)",
    pages     = "15--25",
    url       = "https://aclanthology.org/2020.webnlg-1.2/"
}

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