Toward verbalizing ontologies in isiZulu
This work addresses the need for computational tools in isiZulu, potentially aiding knowledge representation and machine translation, though it is incremental as it builds on existing verbalization approaches.
The researchers tackled the problem of generating natural language from ontologies in isiZulu, a widely spoken but computationally under-resourced language, by devising verbalization patterns for logical constructs like subsumption and quantification, and evaluated them through a survey showing differences in preferences between linguists and non-linguists.
IsiZulu is one of the eleven official languages of South Africa and roughly half the population can speak it. It is the first (home) language for over 10 million people in South Africa. Only a few computational resources exist for isiZulu and its related Nguni languages, yet the imperative for tool development exists. We focus on natural language generation, and the grammar options and preferences in particular, which will inform verbalization of knowledge representation languages and could contribute to machine translation. The verbalization pattern specification shows that the grammar rules are elaborate and there are several options of which one may have preference. We devised verbalization patterns for subsumption, basic disjointness, existential and universal quantification, and conjunction. This was evaluated in a survey among linguists and non-linguists. Some differences between linguists and non-linguists can be observed, with the former much more in agreement, and preferences depend on the overall structure of the sentence, such as singular for subsumption and plural in other cases.