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Representing and Aligning Similar Relations: Parts and Wholes in isiZulu vs. English

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Language, Data, and Knowledge (LDK 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10318))

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Abstract

Ontology-enabled medical information systems are used in Sub-Saharan Africa, which require localisation of Semantic Web technologies, such as ontology verbalisation, yet keeping a link with the English language-based systems. In realising this, we zoom in on the part-whole relations that are ubiquitous in medical ontologies, and the isiZulu language. The analysis of part-whole relations in isiZulu revealed both ‘underspecification’—therewith also challenging the transitivity claim—and three refinements cf. the list of common part-whole relations. This was first implemented for the monolingual scenario so that it generates structured natural language from an ontology in isiZulu. Two new natural language-independent correspondence patterns are proposed to solve non-1:1 object property alignments, which are subsequently used to align the part-whole taxonomies informed by the two languages.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    mobilezulu.org.za.

  2. 2.

    https://wiki.openmrs.org/display/projects/Home.

  3. 3.

    https://www.transifex.com/openmrs/OpenMRS/.

  4. 4.

    http://www.ontologydesignpatterns.org.

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Acknowledgments

This work is based on the research supported in part by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (Grant Number 93397). The author would like to thank M. Xakaza for assistance with tool development.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

    C. Maria Keet

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  1. C. Maria Keet
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Correspondence to C. Maria Keet .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Jorge Gracia

  2. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Francis Bond

  3. Insight Centre for Data Analytics, National University of Ireland, Galway, Galway, Ireland

    John P. McCrae

  4. Insight Centre for Data Analytics, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

    Paul Buitelaar

  5. Goethe-University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany

    Christian Chiarcos

  6. University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany

    Sebastian Hellmann

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Keet, C.M. (2017). Representing and Aligning Similar Relations: Parts and Wholes in isiZulu vs. English. In: Gracia, J., Bond, F., McCrae, J., Buitelaar, P., Chiarcos, C., Hellmann, S. (eds) Language, Data, and Knowledge. LDK 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10318. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59888-8_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59888-8_5

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