On the ontology of part-whole relations in Zulu language and culture

Keet, C. Maria and Khumalo, Langa (2018) On the ontology of part-whole relations in Zulu language and culture, Proceedings of 10th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems 2018 (FOIS'18), 17-21 September, 2018, Cape Town, South Africa, 306, 225-238, IOS Press.

PDF FAIA306-0225.pdf Download (434kB)

Abstract

Parthood and attendant part-whole relations enjoy interest in ontology authoring for various subject domains, as well as in, e.g., NLP to understand text. The list of common part-whole relations is occasionally slightly modified for languages other than English. For isiZulu, it was shown that there are not always 1:1 mappings and, moreover, dictionaries list many more translations for parthood and part-whole relations. This complicates selecting the semantically appropriate ones for localising ontologies or aligning local ontologies to other ones. It also raises the question whether the ‘common’ part-whole relations are really that common. We aim to investigate the extant part-whole relations in isiZulu and determine their ontological status.We harvested a lexicon of 81 terms from dictionaries, which was reduced to 31 through several iterations of refinement, of which 13 were formalised and aligned to well-known part-whole relations. It showed that in some cases distinctions are made—and for which words exist—that have not been included before in part-whole relations, yet in other cases it is more coarse-grained; e.g., a parthood for portions of cloth, for objects properly contained in the mouth, and for regions with a part-region that has a fiat boundary and objects located in it.

Item Type:	Conference paper
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Ontology, isiZulu, ontology engineering, mereology
Subjects:	Computing methodologies > Artificial intelligence
Alternate Locations:	http://ebooks.iospress.nl/volumearticle/50261, http://www.meteck.org/files/FOIS18PartsisiZulu.pdf
Date Deposited:	09 Nov 2018
Last Modified:	10 Oct 2019 15:31
URI:	http://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/id/eprint/1273

Actions (login required)

View Item