Dear Denny, Daniel,

thanks for your question. I try to answer.

ad 1) "ask somebody about" and "ask somebody to" are two different syntactic and semantic frames.

Please look at the final spec of the lemon model:

https://www.w3.org/community/ontolex/wiki/Final_Model_Specification#Syntacti...

In particular, check example: synsem/example7

There you see two different syntactic frames for the word "give". In this case they both represent the same sense corresponding to an exchange of goods but with different syntactic construcitons.

In your case for "ask" there would be also two syntactic frames, but two senses instead of one.

If you want I can send you a modelled example.

2) Such spelling variants are modelled in lemon as two different representations of the same lexical entry.

See ontolex/example3 in the above mentioned spec. After all, it is the same word with the same meanings and same pronunciation but just with a different spelling for each dialect of English.

In our understanding these are not two different forms as you mention, but two different spellings of the same form.

A form represents a particular grammatical variant, not a spelling variant. In this case it is the singular form of the noun. But both spellings really represent the same (grammatical) form, that is the singular form of the noun.

You do not need to specify one main written representation for each form, as both are valid depending on the context.

The preference for showing e.g. the American or English variant should be stated by the application that uses the lexicon.

Does this help?

Philipp

Am 11.11.16 um 20:07 schrieb Denny Vrandečić:

The Wikidata Lexeme model is basically based on Lemon, so I wanted to ask you whether you have answers for the following questions in Lemon?

Feel free to answer directly to the list:

https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata-tech/2016-November/001057.htm...

Cheers, Denny

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Daniel Kinzler <daniel.kinzler@wikimedia.de mailto:daniel.kinzler@wikimedia.de> Date: Fri, Nov 11, 2016 at 9:03 AM Subject: [Wikidata-tech] Two questions about Lexeme Modeling To: wikidata-tech <wikidata-tech@lists.wikimedia.org mailto:wikidata-tech@lists.wikimedia.org>

Hi all!

There is two questions about modelling lexemes that are bothering me. One is an old question, and one I only came across recently.

1. The question that came up for me recently is how we model the

grammatical context for senses. For instance, "to ask" can mean requesting information, or requesting action, depending on whether we use "ask somebody about" or "ask somebody to". Similarly, "to shit" has entirely different meanings when used reflexively ("I shit myself").

There is no good place for this in our current model. The information could be placed in a statement on the word Sense, but that would be kind of non-obvious, and would not (at least not easily) allow for a concise rendering, in the way we see it in most dictionaries ("to ask sbdy to do sthg"). The alternative would be to treat each usage with a different grammatical context as a separate Lexeme (a verb phrase Lexeme), so "to shit oneself" would be a separate lemma. That could lead to a fragmentation of the content in a way that is quite unexpected to people used to traditional dictionaries.

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.

Got a better idea?

2. The older question is how we handle different renderings

(spellings, scripts) of the same lexeme. In English we have "color" vs "colour", in German we have "stop" vs "stopp" and "Maße" vs "Masse". In Serbian, we have a Roman and Cyrillic rendering for every word. We can treat these as separate Lexemes, but that would mean duplicating all information about them. We could have a single Lemma, and represent the others as alternative Forms, or using statements on the Lexeme. But that raises the question which spelling or script should be the "main" one, and used in the lemma.

I would prefer to have multi-variant lemmas. They would work like the multi-lingual labels we have now on items, but restricted to the variants of a single language. For display, we would apply a similar language fallback mechanism we now apply when showing labels.

2b) if we treat lemmas as multi-variant, should Forms also be multi-variant, or should they be per-variant? Should the glosse of a Sense be multi-variant? I currently tend towards "yes" for all of the above.

What do you think?

-- Daniel Kinzler Senior Software Developer

Wikimedia Deutschland Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.

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