Welcome, Jan!
I start by agreeing with you, but there has to be a but.
I certainly agree that there would be a standard way to express a particular Wikidata statement. For new statements, there might be a default implied by the Property being added to the Wikidata Item or, if necessary, a choice between a small number. But as soon as the Property implies or connects to a different Item, there is a question about which might come first, even in a neutral context. Is it "the UK's Head of State is Queen Elizabeth II" or "Queen Elizabeth II is the UK's Head of State"? (Wikidata has Q9682 with position held (Property P39) connecting to (among others) Q9134365 (monarch of the United Kingdom) with subclass (P279) head of state (Q48352)... but I simplified.) On a page about her, [she] is Queen of the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth Realms but on a page about Canada, [the country's] queen (or monarch) is Queen Elizabeth II.
Anyway, in general, yes, "Bobby hit [a or the] ball with [a or the] bat". But if you're talking about the bat, it's likely to be "The bat Bobby hit a ball with" or "The bat that Bobby used to hit a ball" or "The bat with which Bobby hit a ball", according to the agreed style. And if you're talking about the notable ball and the not-so-notable Bobby: "The ball that was hit with the bat by Bobby".
And (agreeing with "no") no, we don't need to consider all the permutations of {Bobby, ball, bat, hum, hit, over the stadium, ...}, but we do need to know how we avoid considering so many and how we handle those which remain.
Best regards,
Al.
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Today's Topics:
1. Re: Conjugation and Declension Functions (Jan Ainali)
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Message: 1
Date: Sat, 25 Jul 2020 09:30:59 +0200
From: Jan Ainali <ainali.jan@gmail.com>
To: "General public mailing list for the discussion of Abstract
Wikipedia (aka Wikilambda)" <abstract-wikipedia@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Abstract-wikipedia] Conjugation and Declension Functions
Message-ID:
<CAKwu9WF8B5f1dwzdisASnHrnEarJwaxL0iHu73CFUoX3j0cabw@mail.gmail.com>
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Den lör 25 juli 2020 kl 01:07 skrev Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com
>:
> When exploring how best to add the thematic relation of instrument to the
> agent-patient pair (e.g. adding “using the bat” to “Bobby hit the ball”), I
> observed that, for the same input grammatical arguments, there was a set of
> possible output paraphrases:
>
>
>
> 1. “Bobby hit the ball using the bat”
> 2. “Bobby, using the bat, hit the ball”
> 3. “Using the bat, Bobby hit the ball”
>
>
>
> I wondered: how might we be able to generate each?
>
>
>
Since we are generating text for an encyclopedia, do we need to be able to
pick which one of them? I think we could have a manual of style that says
that method 1. is the one we use. That simplifies the language not only for
the reader, but also our task by not trying to be able to create all
nuances of spoken language.
/Jan
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