SALT Rhetorical Ontology


Latest Version:: http://salt.semanticauthoring.org/ontologies/sro

Authors:: Tudor Groza, DERI, tudor.groza (at) deri.org; Siegfried Handschuh, DERI, siegfried.handschuh (at) deri.org

Editor:: Tudor Groza, DERI, tudor.groza (at) deri.org

Ontology:: XML/RDFS Serialization: SRO

Introduction

The SALT Rhetorical Ontology externalizes the rhetorical and the argumentation captured in the publication's content. Conceptually, the entire ontology revolves around two abstract entities, i.e. the discourse knowledge item (or epistemic item) and the rhetorical block. These two entities represent the two levels of granularity targeted by the model:

a fine-grained level that creates a semantic wrap around small pieces of individual text -- text chunks varying from part of a sentence to a couple of sentences less than a paragraph -- and
a coarse-grained level that tags paragraphs according to their rhetorical role.

Without providing a formal definition, we consider a discourse knowledge item to be a piece of text that transpires the author's contribution in the respective publication. Obviously, the contribution can take several forms. It can represent a claim, which is the author's original contribution, motivating the work behind the publication, it can be a position (positive, negative or neutral), which is the author's statement in regards to someone else's claims, or it can act as an argument that supports the claims stated by the author. Concisely, the discourse knowledge item is an abstract term for all the concepts in the model dealing with the fine-grained semantic structure, i.e. rhetorical elements and argumentation elements.

The figure above depicts the overall structure of the SALT Rhetorical Ontology. This is mainly split into three main parts:

the rhetorical blocks side, dealing with the coarse-grained rhetorical structure of the publication's content,
the rhetorical relations side, modeling the fine-grained rhetorical structure of the publication's content, and
the argumentation side, describing the argumentation captured in the publication's content.

List of Entities

Ontology Classes Description

RhetoricalElement

Superclasses	rdfs:Resource
Subclasses	sro:Nucleus, sro:Satellite
In domain of:	sro:partOfRhetoricalBlock, sro:represents, sro:hasAnnotation
In range of:	sro:containsRhetoricalElement
Description	Text span with a rhetorical role.

Nucleus

Superclasses	sro:RhetoricalElement
Subclasses	sro:Claim
In domain of:	--
In range of:	sro:hasNucleus
Description	Text span playing an important role in the understanding of the entire text. It it essential to the writer's purpose and reader's understanding. Usually a piece of text comprising only nuclei can be understood to some extent.

Satellite

Superclasses	sro:RhetoricalElement
Subclasses	sro:Support
In domain of:	--
In range of:	sro:hasSatellite
Description	Text span playing a secondary role and supporting the Nucleus with additional information. It is often incomprehensible without the nucleus.

Claim

Superclasses	sro:Nucleus
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--
Description	A Nucleus leveraged to the level of the entire publication, representing a discourse knowledge item that encapsulates the essence of the publication.

Support

Superclasses	sro:Satellite
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--
Description	A Satellite leveraged to the level of the entire publication, thus supporting a Claim with additional information.

RhetoricalRelation

Superclasses	rdfs:Resource
Subclasses	sro:Antithesis, sro:Circumstance, sro:Concession, sro:Condition, sro:Cause, sro:Consequence, sro:Elaboration, sro:Evidence, sro:Means, sro:Preparation, sro:Purpose, sro:Restatement
In domain of:	sro:hasNucleus, sro:hasSatellite
In range of:	sro:hasNucleus, sro:hasSatellite
Description	A linguistic relation between two or more discourse knowledge items having a particular rhetorical role.

Antithesis

Superclasses	sro:RhetoricalRelation
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--
Description	The connected Nucleus and Satellite are in contrast. Because of the incompatibility that arises from the contrast, one cannot have a positive regard for both of those situations. Comprehending the Satellite and the incompatibility between the situations, increases reader's positive regard for the Nucleus.
Example	Together with the lexical and syntactic information of the parsed queries, semantic information in the knowledge bases can also be utilized to help formulate the formal query, but how to accomplish this is still an open problem.

Circumstance

Superclasses	sro:RhetoricalRelation
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--
Description	The Satellite sets a framework in the subject matter within which the reader is intended to interpret the Nucleus.
Example	When an ontology is selected as the underlying knowledge base, the Lexicon Builder automatically extracts entities out of the ontology to build the Lexicon.

Concession

Superclasses	sro:RhetoricalRelation
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--
Description	The writer acknowledges a potential or apparent incompatibility between the Nucleus and the Satellite. Recognizing the compatibility between the Nucleus and the Satellite increases the reader's positive regard for the Nucleus.
Example	Although the first natural language interface system came out more than three decades ago, a fully portable and widely used system for formalized knowledge bases is still unavailable.

Condition

Superclasses	sro:RhetoricalRelation
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--
Description	The realization of the Nucleus depends on the realization of the Satellite.
Example	If the input query is classified into some category, AquaLog will process it correctly.

Cause

Superclasses	sro:RhetoricalRelation
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--
Description	The Nucleus presents a situation that could have caused the situation presented in the Satellite. The situation presented in the Nucleus is more central to the writer's purposes than is that presented in the Satellite.
Example	Because the annotation process is interleaved with the writing process in the LaTeX environment, the targeted PDF document does not even exist yet.

Consequence

Superclasses	sro:RhetoricalRelation
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--
Description	The Satellite presents a situation that could have caused the agent of the action in the Nucleus to perform that action. Without the presentation of the Satellite, the reader might not regard the action as motivated or know the particular motivation. The Nucleus is more central to writer's purposes in putting forth the Nucleus - Satellite combination than the Satellite is.
Example	The user-defined synonyms are not mandatory for the Lexicon, and all the mandatory contents are extracted in a totally automatic way. Therefore, the construction of the Lexicon is portable.

Elaboration

Superclasses	sro:RhetoricalRelation
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--
Description	The Satellite presents additional detail about the situation or some element of subject matter which is presented in the Nucleus or indiferentially accessible in the Nucleus.
Example	In SALT, this is covered elsewhere (see the next section), which is why our A is the Abstract of the document. Furthermore, we extend ABCDE with the concepts Motivation, Scenario and Conclusion. Finally, the Argumentative part of the ontology allows the further modeling of scientific discourse in the form of Arguments and Counter Arguments.

Evidence

Superclasses	sro:RhetoricalRelation
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--
Description	The reader's comprehending the Satellite increases the reader's belief of the Nucleus.
Example	Since one word may match multiple OntoEnties, there may be different combinations and multiple valid OntoTriple result sets.

Means

Superclasses	sro:RhetoricalRelation
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--
Description	The Satellite presents a method or instrument which tends to make realization of the Nucleus more likely.
Example	By physically sorting data on the subject column, subject-subject joins between two tables, a very frequent operation, can be realized in linear time.

Preparation

Superclasses	sro:RhetoricalRelation
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--
Description	The Satellite precedes the Nucleus on the text. The Satellite tends to make the reader more ready, interested or oriented for reading the Nucleus.
Example	We note A (c1 , c2) the set of acyclic paths between c1 and c2 and HSO : A (c1 , c2 ) --> B the function, such that HSO(p) is true.

Purpose

Superclasses	sro:RhetoricalRelation
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--
Description	The Satellite is to be realized through the activity in the Nucleus.
Example	In order to help bridge the gap between user vocabulary and ontology vocabulary, general dictionary WordNet is utilized.

Restatement

Superclasses	sro:RhetoricalRelation
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--
Description	The Satellite restates the Nucleus, where the Satellite and the Nucleus are of comparable bulk. The Nucleus is more central to writer's purpose than the Satellite is.
Example	To translate a natural language query into a SPARQL query, we must find the targets, i.e. the words that correspond to the variables after “SELECT” in the resultant SPARQL query.

RhetoricalBlock

Superclasses	rdfs:Resource
Subclasses	sro:Abstract, sro:Motivation, sro:Scenario, sro:Contribution, sro:Discussion, sro:Evaluation, sro:Background, sro:Conclusion, sro:Entities
In domain of:	sro:containsRhetoricalElement, sro:hasAnnotation
In range of:	sro:partOfRhetoricalBlock
Description	Text span within the publication having the length of a paragraph and an associated rhetorical role in the overall discourse.

Abstract

Superclasses	sro:RhetoricalBlock
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--
Description	Short overview on the publication's content (implicit rhetorical block).

Scenario

Superclasses	sro:RhetoricalBlock
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--
Description	Real-world use cases in which the solution provided by the publication is applicable.

Motivation

Superclasses	sro:RhetoricalBlock
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--
Description	The reason motivating the research presented in the paper.

Contribution

Superclasses	sro:RhetoricalBlock
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--
Description	The solution proposed by the publication.

Discussion

Superclasses	sro:RhetoricalBlock
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--
Description	Interesting issues discovered while researching the publication's topic.

Evaluation

Superclasses	sro:RhetoricalBlock
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--
Description	The evaluation methodology and its associated results.

Background

Superclasses	sro:RhetoricalBlock
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--
Description	Builds a view over the related work and foundational theories in the field.

Conclusion

Superclasses	sro:RhetoricalBlock
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--
Description	Conclusive overview of the publication.

Entities

Superclasses	sro:RhetoricalBlock
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--
Description	List of cited references (implicit rhetorical block).

Position

Superclasses	rdfs:Resource
Subclasses	sro:Request, sro:Agreement, sro:Disagreement, sro:NeutralPosition
In domain of:	sro:statedAbout, sro:hasAnnotation
In range of:	sro:represents, sro:arguments, sro:hasPosition

Request

Superclasses	sro:Position
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--

Agreement

Superclasses	sro:Position
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--

Disagreement

Superclasses	sro:Position
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--

NeutralPosition

Superclasses	sro:Position
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--

Argument

Superclasses	rdfs:Resource
Subclasses	sro:Challenge, sro:Justification
In domain of:	sro:arguments
In range of:	sro:represents, sro:statedAbout, sro:isArgumentedBy

Challenge

Superclasses	sro:Argument
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--

Justification

Superclasses	sro:Argument
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	--
In range of:	--

Issue

Superclasses	rdfs:Resource
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	sro:isArgumentedBy, sro:hasPosition
In range of:	sro:represents, sro:raises, sro:statedAbout, sro:arguments

Statement

Superclasses	rdfs:Resource
Subclasses	--
In domain of:	sro:raises, sro:hasAnnotation
In range of:	sro:statedAbout

Ontology Properties Description

hasNucleus

Type	rdf:Property, rdfs:Resource
Domain	sro:RhetoricalRelation
Range	sro:Nucleus, sro:RhetoricalRelation

hasSatellite

Type	rdf:Property, rdfs:Resource
Domain	sro:RhetoricalRelation
Range	sro:Satellite, sro:RhetoricalRelation

containsRhetoricalElement

Type	rdf:Property, rdfs:Resource
Domain	sro:RhetoricalBlock
Range	sro:RhetoricalElement

partOfRhetoricalBlock

Type	rdf:Property, rdfs:Resource
Domain	sro:RhetoricalElement
Range	sro:RhetoricalBlock

represents

Type	rdf:Property, rdfs:Resource
Domain	sro:RhetoricalElement
Range	sro:Issue, sro:Argument, sro:Position

raises

Type	rdf:Property, rdfs:Resource
Domain	sro:Statement
Range	sro:Issue

statedAbout

Type	rdf:Property, rdfs:Resource
Domain	sro:Position
Range	sro:Issue, sro:Statement, sro:Argument

arguments

Type	rdf:Property, rdfs:Resource
Domain	sro:Argument
Range	sro:Position, sro:Issue

isArgumentedBy

Type	rdf:Property, rdfs:Resource
Domain	sro:Issue
Range	sro:Argument

hasPosition

Type	rdf:Property, rdfs:Resource
Domain	sro:Issue
Range	sro:Position

hasAnnotation

Type	rdf:Property, rdfs:Resource
Domain	sro:RhetoricalElement, sro:RhetoricalBlock, sro:Statement, sro:Position
Range	sao:Annotation