Toward verbalizing ontologies in isiZulu

TL;DR

This paper develops verbalization patterns for isiZulu ontologies, addressing resource scarcity and aiming to improve natural language generation and machine translation for the language.

Contribution

It introduces a set of verbalization patterns for isiZulu ontologies and evaluates them through a survey, highlighting linguistic preferences and differences.

Findings

Linguists show higher agreement on verbalization preferences.

Preferences vary with sentence structure, such as singular or plural forms.

The patterns can inform ontology verbalization and language technology development.

Abstract

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.