Hi all!
Sorry for the delay. To keep the conversation in one place, I will reply to
David, Denny, and Philipp in one mail. It's going to be a bit long, sorry...
Am 11.11.2016 um 23:17 schrieb David Cuenca Tudela:
> Hi there!
>
> 1) a possible solution could be to have another category of items ("Gxxx",
> grammatical rule?) to store grammatical structures, like "Noun + verb + object"
> or "Noun + reflexive verb" and then linking to that structure with a qualifier
> of the position that it uses on that structure. Example:
> "to shit" <grammatical structure required> "Subject + reflexive verb + reflexive
> pronoun"
> <role in grammatical structure> "reflexive verb"
I see no need for a separate entity type, this could be done with a regular
Item. If we want this to work nicely for display, though, the software would
need to know about some "magic" properties and their meaning. Since Wikidata
provides a stable global vocabulary, it would not be terrible to hard-code this.
But still, it's special case code...
This is pretty similar to Lemon's "Syntactic Frame" that Philipp pointed out,
see below.
> 2) I would prefer statements as they can be complemented with qualifiers as for
> why it has a certain spelling (geographical variant, old usage, corruption...).
You can always use a statement for this kind of information, just as we do now
on Wikidata with properties for the surname or official name.
The question is how often the flexibility of a statement is really needed. If
it's not too often, it would be ok to require both (the lemma and the statement)
to be entered separately, as we do now for official name, birth name, etc.
Another question is which (multi-term lemma or secondary lemma-in-a-statement)
is easier to handle by a 3rd party consumer. More about that later.
> It would be nice however if there would be some mechanism to have a special kind
> of property that would use its value as an item alias. And this is something
> that could benefit normal items in Wikidata too, as most name properties like
> P1448, P1477 (official name, birth name, etc), should have its value
> automatically show as alias of the item in all languages, if that were
> technologically feasible.
Yes, this would be very convenient. But it would also mix levels of content
(editorial vs. sourced) that are now nicely separated. I'm very tempted, but I'm
not sure it's worth it.
Am 12.11.2016 um 00:08 schrieb Denny Vrandečić:
> Not only that. "I shit myself" is very different from "Don't shit yourself".
> It is not just the reflexivity. It might the whole phrase.
Yes, the boundary to a phrase is not clear cut. But if we need the full power of
modeling as a phrase, we can always do that by creating a separate Lexeme for
the phrase. The question is if that should be the preferred or even the only way
to model the "syntactic frame".
It's typical for a dictionary to have a list of meanings structured like this:
to ask
to ask so. sth.
to ask so. for sth.
to ask so. about sth.
to ask so. after sb.
to ask so. out
...
It would be nice if we had an easy way to create such an overview. If each line
is modeled as a separate Lexeme, we need to decide how these Lexemes should be
connected to allow such an overview.
I feel these "frames" should be attached to senses. Making all of them separate
Lexemes will drive granularity up, making things hard to follow and maintain.
> We could also add this information as a special field in the Sense
> entity, but I don't even know what that field should contain, exactly.
It could be a reference to an Item. Perhaps that item defines a specific
pattern, like "$verb someone" or "$verb someone something" or "$verb oneself".
That pattern (defined by a statement on the item) can then be used to render the
concrete pattern for each word sense.
> Just a usage example on the sense? That would often be enough to express the
> proposition.
Possible, but then it's unclear which parts of the grammar are required to
generate a specific meaning. You'd need some kind of markup in the example,
which I would like to avoid.
> I am not a friend of multi-variant lemmas. I would prefer to either have
> separate Lexemes or alternative Forms. Yes, there will be duplication in the
> data, but this is expected already, and also, since it is machine-readable,
> the duplication can be easily checked and bot-ified.
Getting rid of bots that keep duplicate data in sync was one of the reasons we
created Wikidata, and one of it's major selling points. Bots have a lot of uses,
but copying data around isn't really a good one.
Also, how do you sync deletions? Reverts? The semantics is not trivial.
> Also, this is how Wiktionary works today:
> https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/colour
> https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/color
>
> Notice that there is no primacy of either.
True. But that's not how other dictionaries work:
https://dict.leo.org/ende/index_de.html#/search=color
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/colour
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/color?s=t
Oxford even redirects: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/color
Only dict.cc makes the distinction: https://www.dict.cc/?s=colour vs
https://www.dict.cc/?s=color
We are collecting a LOT of information about each Lexeme. Duplicating it for
all spelling variants is going to be a HUGE pain. And it's not rare, either. I
estimate that we'll be storing like 20% duplicates (assuming one in five words
has two spellings, on average, across all languages). That also means 20%
duplicate notifications in your feed, 20% more pages to watch. I don't like it...
> Having multi-variant lemmas seem to complicate the situation a lot. I think it
> is important to have only one single Lemma for each Lexeme, in order to keep
> display logic simple
Just show all variants, unless told otherwise. In the order given.
There are many many words with multiple spellings, but not many words with more
than two, and few with more than three [citation needed].
> But what is the difference for an entry that doesn't have a BE
> variant in order to reduce redundancy vs an entry that doesn't have a BE
> variant because it has not been entered yet.
We have the problem of distinguishing these cases for all the modeling variants.
Well, with statements you *could* use SomeValue, but I highly doubt that people
will do that.
> Lemmas do not have the capability and flexibility
> of statements.
True. When the full power of a Statement or Lemma is needed, just create one.
I'm just saying that in the vast majority of cases, that's overkill, and a pain
to manage, so that should not be the default way.
> How do you determine the primacy of the American or British English version?
> Fallback would be written into the code base, it would not be amenable to
> community editing through the wiki.
I currently prefer to just always show all spellings, in the order given. For
people who strongly prefer one version over the other, filtering/sorting can be
applied by a gadget, or server side formatting code.
Consumers that only want to show a single lemma can just show the first. Sure,
people will need to figure out primacy. But they would have to do this also if
you go with Statements (which spelling will be the one single lemma?) and
separate Lexemes (either show all, or pick the "main" one somehow).
> Whether separate Lexemes or alternative Forms are better might be different
> from
> language to language, from case to case. By hard-coding the multi-variant
> lemmas, you not only pre-decided the case, but also made the code and the data
> model much more complicated. And not only for the initial development, but for
> perpetuity, whenever the data is used.
I think for a 3rd party consumer that does care about variants, it's a LOT
simpler to deal with multiple lemmas than to deal with Statements with special
properties, getting the ranks right, etc.
And for those who don't care about variants, joining list elements or just
showing the first element is simple enough.
Also: a Wikibase client will need code for dealing with TermLists anyway, since
it needs to handle multi-lingual item labels.
My broader point is: by keeping the (ontology level) meta-model simple, we would
make the actual (instance level) model more complicated. I prefer a more complex
meta-mode, which allows for a simpler instance model. The instance model is what
the community has to deal with, and it's what we'll have gigabytes of.
> We shouldn't force for perfection and covering everything from the beginning.
That is true. But if we miss a crucial aspect, people will build workarounds.
And cleaning those up is a lot of work - and sometimes impossible. This is what
is locking us into the ancient wiki syntax.
> If not every case can be ideally modeled, but we can capture 99.9%
People *will* capture 99.9% - the question is just how much energy that costs
them, and how re-usable the result is.
> Also, there is always Wiktionary as the layer on top of Wikidata
> that actually can easily resolve these issues anyway.
Agreed. But how exactly? For instance, take the two Wiktionary pages on "color"
and "colour". Would they benefit more from two separate Lexemes (similar to how
things are on Wiktionary), or from a single Lexeme, to automatically keep the
pages in sync?
The model determines how our data is going to be used. We cannot rely on the
presentation layer to work out kinks in the model. And more importantly, we
can't make fundamental changes to the model later, as that would break millions
of pages.
> Once we have the simple pieces working, we can actually try to understand
> where the machinery is creaking and not working well, and then think about
> these issues.
Slow iteration is nice as long as you don't produce artifact you need to stay
compatible with. I have become extremely wary of lock-in - Wikitext is the worst
lock-in I have ever seen. Some aspects of how we implemented the Wikibase model
for Wikidata also have proven to be really hard to iterate on. Iterating the
model itself is even harder, since it is bound to break all clients in a
fundamental way. We just got very annoyed comments just for making two fields in
the Wikibase model optional.
Switching from single-lemma to multi-lemma would be a major breaking change,
with lots of energy burned on backwards compatibility. The opposite switch would
be much simpler (because it adds guarantees, instead of removing them).
> But until then I would prefer to keep the system as dumb and
> simple as possible.
I would prefer to keep the user generated *data* as straight forward as
possible. That's more important to me than a simple meta-model. The complexity
of the instance data determines the maintenance burden.
Am 20.11.2016 um 21:06 schrieb Philipp Cimiano:
> Please look at the final spec of the lemon model:
>
>
https://www.w3.org/community/ontolex/wiki/Final_Model_ Specification#Syntactic_Frames
>
> In particular, check example: synsem/example7
Ah, thank you! I think we could model this in a similar way, by referencing an
Item that represents a (type of) frame from the Sense. Whether this should be a
special field or just a Statement I'm still undecided on.
Is it correct that in the Lemon model, it's not *required* to define a syntactic
frame for a sense? Is there something like a default frame?
> 2) Such spelling variants are modelled in lemon as two different
> representations
> of the same lexical entry.
[...]
> In our understanding these are not two different forms as you mention, but two
> different spellings of the same form.
Indeed, sorry for being imprecise. And yes, if we have a multi-variant lemma, we
should also have multi-variant Forms. Our lemma corresponds to the canonical
form in Lemon, if I understand correctly.
> The preference for showing e.g. the American or English variant should be
> stated by the application that uses the lexicon.
I agree. I think Denny is concerned with putting that burden on the application.
Proper language fallback isn't trivial, and the application may be a light
weight JS library... But I think for the naive case, it's fine to simply show
all representations.
Thank you all for your input!
--
Daniel Kinzler
Senior Software Developer
Wikimedia Deutschland
Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
--
Daniel Kinzler
Senior Software Developer
Wikimedia Deutschland
Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
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