DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly
2021
Volume 15 Number 3
Volume 15 Number 3
A Model for Representing Diachronic Terminologies: the Saussure Case Study
Abstract
The aim of this article is to present a model for representing in an explicit and formal way the diachronic evolution of concepts and terms in a given domain, so that this formalization can be machine-actionable. The approach we here propose is based on Semantic Web technologies in order to guarantee interoperability and reuse across scientific communities of diachronic terminological resources that can be thus easily accessed, interconnected and mutually enriched. More specifically, the representation of dynamic evolution of terms and concepts was performed in OWL using the N-ary relations mechanisms. In addition, a set of SWRL rules was set up, in order to automatically identify the evolution of the concepts evoked within a text, as well as the terms representing these concepts. Our model was adopted to formally represent diachronic aspects of Saussure’s terminology as they emerge from his works. An example will be provided to highlight the potential of such a knowledge structuration for gaining a wider understanding of the profound terminological and conceptual changes brought about by the paradigmatic and epistemological revolutions in sciences.
1. Introduction
Πάντα ῥεῖ. Everything is subjected to the inexorable law of change: the reality,
the categories through which we organize it and the words we use to talk about
it.
This is particularly the case for the history of science. Over the centuries,
scholars have built different theoretical models in response to the continuous
innovation that emerged from observation sometimes producing a real scientific
revolution in the worldview. Needless to say, a change in conceptual level often
corresponds to a change in terminology[1]: new terms can be introduced to
express the new system of concepts or old terms can be dismissed when the
concept becomes obsolete. The aim of this article is to present a model for
formally representing the diachronic evolution of concepts and terms in a given
domain, so that this formalization can be machine-actionable. Taking advantage
from past experiences conducted in the context of several projects[2], we propose here an approach based on
Semantic Web technologies that guarantees interoperability and reuse of
diachronic terminological resources across scientific communities.
The development of standards for representing and exchanging data has always been
a concern in the terminological field. Interoperability across terminological
formats is basically ensured by adopting the ISO standard 30042: 2008 TBX
(TermBase eXchange), an XML-based family of terminology exchange formats
compliant with the Terminological Markup Framework (TMF - ISO 16642: 2003).
Over the last few years, interesting solutions for interoperability have been
offered by the Semantic Web technologies and the Linked Open Data initiative
which allow data to be shared, reused across applications and linked with the
resources available on the Web, thus benefiting from the whole datacloud of URIs
with which reference resources like DBpedia are already networked.
In terminology, there has been a growing trend towards representing and
publishing terminological resources on the Semantic Web according to Linked Open
Data principles, as demonstrated for example by the NCBO (National Center for
Biomedical Ontology) BioPortal, a repository of more than 300 biomedical
ontologies and terminologies converted into RDF [Salvadores et al. 2013];
or by the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) consortium [Smith et al. 2007]
aiming to create a family of new or extant ontologies based on shared principles
compliant with the Semantic Web technologies. These and other similar
initiatives are all driven by the same need, namely to avoid that terminologies,
created by proprietary software, exist independently of each other, hidden in
isolated databases. The lack of semantic interoperability, indeed, precludes any
possibility of progress, as medical data can be exploited to their full
potential only if they are interconnected to each other. Sharing large
quantities of data structured in ontologies makes it possible to use IT
applications and artificial intelligence systems, enabling thus better
diagnostics, early disease prevention and, more generally, a deeper
understanding of the human biology and health.
Another initiative deserving to be mentioned is the EuroVoc management based on
technologies in line with W3C recommendations and with the latest developments
in classification standards. A collaborative project started in 2019 and
undertaken by the Publications Office of the European Union and the
International Labour Office [Dechandon et al. 2019] aims to align EuroVoc
with other controlled vocabularies and publish them as Linked Open Data. The
objective is to improve data accessibility and guarantee large-scale
interoperability, thus facilitating the authoring-translating-publishing chain
as well as the work in public administrations and international
organisations.
Finally, Cimiano et al. (2015) proposed an
approach to convert terminological datasets originally stored in TBX format to
RDF by means of an online service named TBX2RDF, allowing thereby terminological
resources to be used and enhanced across different scientific communities and,
in particular, to become part of the great Linguistic Linked (Open) Data cloud
(see infra).
Nevertheless, as we shall see, using these technologies to represent the
diachronic evolution of terminological and conceptual data constitutes an
interesting challenge, since OWL (Web Ontology Language), the W3C standard
language developed to represent ontologies in the Semantic Web, is fundamentally
static and monotonic.
2. Terminology and Diachrony
In the terminological literature, the diachronic dimension has been neglected for
a long time. This was mainly due to the onomasiological, prescriptive and static
approach underlying the General Theory of Terminology (GTT) elaborated by Wüster
in 1968.
Wüster’s approach to terminology was based on a neo-positivist referential and
taxonomic semiotics [Slodzian 2000], according to which concepts
take precedence over words. In GTT terms are monosemic and concepts are
monoreferential; a perfect correspondence is established between them: each
concept corresponds to one and only one term. The term is thus equivalent to a
symbol, to a “désignateur rigide”
[Kripke 1995], since it works in much the same way as the system
of proper names works in general language. Conceptual structures, on the other
hand, are regarded as universal and static like their referents and any
diachronic dimension is neutralised.
In outlining the theoretical and methodological differences between lexicology
and terminology, Cabré (1999: 8) emphasized that
terminology is only concerned with synchronic aspects:
This view, which today is considered the most systematic, coherent theoretical approach to terms, differs from lexicological theory in three ways: in the priority of the concept over the designation; in being exclusively concerned with the level of the terminological unit and not with the other levels of linguistic description; in excluding any diachronic approach of information.
Terminology began to open up to diachrony timidly after the “odyssée terminotique”
[Slodzian 2000] of the 80s, when an impressive number of term
banks, based on the synchronic traditional vision of the Viennese school, were
produced and spread (EURODICAUTOM, NORMATERM, UNITERM, TERMIUM, IATE etc.). In
1988 a symposium entitled “Terminologie diachronique”
was organized by the Centre de Terminologie of Bruxelles, but ten years after
Møller (1998) still regretted a “quantitative and / or
qualitative deficit” in that branch of terminology for which he
coined the neologism “terminochronie”. Over the last twenty
years several studies have been conducted focussing on the evolution of concepts
and terms in specialized languages (see inter al. van Campenhoudt 1997, Dury 2008, Zanola
2014, Kristiansen 2014), as well
as on methods for compiling diachronic corpora [Dury 2004] and
identifying the evolution of knowledge in corpora [Picton 2009].
As underlined by Dury and Picton (2009), this lack
of interest for diachronic aspects in terminology was mainly due to technical,
pragmatic, psychological, and most of all theoretical and historical obstacles.
Diachronic terminology is, indeed, by definition a textual terminology [Bourigault and Slodzian 1999]
[Pearson 1998], a terminology of “discourse”.
Terms must be analysed in their real context of use and must not be seen as
abstract and static labels associated with concepts. They should be rather
regarded as linguistic signs, which enter into a dynamic relationship both with
the concepts and with the other linguistic signs that constitute the
terminological system. In a diachronic perspective, terminological work is
fundamentally semasiological and descriptive. In order to grasp terminological
variation over time, the starting point is the sense that a term acquires within
a real linguistic context and the focus is on language as it is actually used
(Ist-Norm) in real specialised (con-)texts and not on
language as it should be used (Soll-Norm). To use Bourigault
and Slodzian words (1999: 31), “le texte est le point de départ de la description lexicale à
construire. On va du texte vers le terme”.
Texts are usually the unique source that the scholars have at their disposal in
order to access disappeared states of languages and more completely understand
the history of terms and their evolution over time. Texts play a crucial role to
establish when and how words acquire (terminologization) and lose
(determinologization) their terminological status, or how a term passes from one
specialized field to another or from the intimate pages of a scholar to the
entire scientific community.
Regarding this last aspect, in particular, texts constitute a precious means to
record the typical terminological fluctuation that precedes or follows the
formation of the so-called “normal science” state. As a
matter of fact, in a phase of “normal science”, when the
development of knowledge is adherent to what Kuhn (1970) calls “paradigm”, the system of terms is
standard, explicitly defined and consensually used within a scientific
community. In revolutionary phases, on the contrary, when a revision of existing
scientific beliefs or practices is involved, terminology can be characterized by
great instability. Texts become thus a conceptual and terminological space of
creativity, where scholars think, reflect and give a linguistic form to their
ideas. In these cases, ephemeral lexical formations are often attested only in
the idiolect of the one who forged them without ever taking root within the
scientific community.
An example of this phenomenon will be illustrated in Section 6 with Ferdinand de Saussure’s terminology.
3. Modelling an Interoperable Terminological Resource
When modelling a digital scholarly resource, the key point is to choose a model
capable of maximizing its usefulness in the community of reference. According to
the “FAIR guidelines”, scholarly data should be
Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable [Wilkinson et al. 2016]. First of all, for data to be findable, they must be referred to using a
globally unique and persistent identifier and must also be indexed in a
searchable resource. Furthermore, data must be accessible through a standardized
protocol and, at the same time, has to be interoperable in virtue of its
representation in a formal and shared knowledge representation language.
Finally, to be reusable, data must be “described with a
plurality of accurate and relevant attributes” (ibidem: 4).
In order to pursue the FAIR policies and to build fair diachronic terminological
resources, our choice was to adopt the paradigms of Semantic Web technologies
[Berners-Lee et al. 2001] and Linked (Open) Data [Bizer et al. 2011].
The intuition behind the Semantic Web is to shift from a Web of documents, viewed
as separate data silos containing unstructured or semi-structured data, to a Web
of data where open repositories of semantically enriched data can be accessed
and interlinked. To make this vision concrete, the following technologies -
often referred to as the Semantic Web layer cake or Semantic Web technology -
are used: Resource Description Framework[3]
(RDF), RDF Schema (RDFS), Web Ontology Language (OWL), Semantic Web Rule
Language (SWRL) and SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL).
Semantic Web and Linked (Open) Data best practices require datasets to be
published using RDF: data is described as triples in the form of Subject -
Predicate - Object, where the Subject is a resource, the Object can be either a
resource or a data value (such as a string of character or a number), and the
Predicate (also called “property”) relates the Subject and
the Object together. Basically, a dataset in the Linked Data world is a set of
triples.
OWL is a family of languages, based on RDF/XML, and recommended by the World Wide
Web Consortium since 2004 for representing and sharing ontologies[4]
on the Web. There are three variants of OWL, with different levels of
expressiveness: OWL Lite, which supports a classification hierarchy and simple
constraints; OWL DL, which provides the maximum expressiveness while retaining
computational completeness and decidability, and OWL Full which allows for
maximum expressiveness, resulting nonetheless undecidable.
In order to publish structured data on the Web in a way that they can be easily
linked to each other, a number of rules was set up by Berners-Lee, known as
Linked (Open) Data principles. According to them, each entity of a dataset must
be uniquely identified by a special “address” called URI
(Uniform Resource Identifier), each URI must be available on the Web via the
HTTP protocol[5],
each look up of a URI must be answered with useful information and using
standards, and finally, whenever possible, data should be linked to other
data.
Over the last years, the Linked (Open) Data approach has attracted the attention
of a linguistic community becoming more and more sensitive to the question of
interoperability between resources. An increasing number of openly available and
interconnected linguistic datasets have been published as part of the Web of
data, resulting in the so-called Linked Open Data Cloud (LLOD). This trend,
nicely visualised in https://lod-cloud.net, is particularly boosted by the Ontology
Lexicon (Ontolex) community group, whose activity resulted in the creation of
lemon[6]
(Lexicon Model for Ontologies), a meta-model allowing lexical resources to be
published in RDF, linked and shared according to Semantic Web principles. At
present lemon constitutes a standard de facto,
as it is grounded on W3C and ISO standards, such as LMF (Lexical Markup
Framework) [Francopoulo et al. 2006], Lexinfo [Cimiano et al. 2011] – this latter aligned with ISOCat - and LIR (Linguistic Information
Repository) [Montiel-Ponsoda 2008].
Lemon has been successfully adopted in many different contexts for
different purposes, such as, for example, to publish several existing lexical
resources as linked data, including DBnary [Sérasset 2015], the
Parole-Simple-Clips Italian lexicon [Del Gratta et al. 2015], WordNet [McCrae et al. 2014], UBY [Eckle-Kohler 2015] and BabelNet
[Ehrmann et al. 2014], to represent linguistic resources for
sentiment analysis within the EuroSentiment project [Sánchez-Rada et al. 2014], to model linguistic annotations in FrameBase, a
linked open knowledge base which integrates and interconnects heterogeneous
sources of structured knowledge [Rouces et al. 2017].
The lemon core module, named ontoLex[7], is composed of
three fundamental elements: i) the Lexical Entry
class, in turn specified in Word, Multiword Expression, and Affix; ii) the Lexical Form class
where the morphological variants of a lexical entry are described and associated
with a written representation (writtenRep); iii)
the Lexical Sense class, which constitutes the
reification of the relationship between a lexical entry and an ontology entity
defined in a given “external” ontology. In lemon, in fact, concepts, conceived as
extra-linguistic entities, receive a formal and explicit description in a
separate ontology, according to the principle known as “semantics by reference”
[Buitelaar 2010].
The lemon model has been designed to be modular and extensible: in
other words, new modules can be created, if required, to represent a peculiar
aspect of a lexical or terminological resource. To manage semantic shifts, for
example, a diachronic extension, called lemonDIA,
was developed [Khan et al. 2014].
4. Models and Tools for the Representation of Diachrony
Knowledge representation languages underlying Semantic Web technologies are based
on binary relations. They typically connect two instances without any temporal
information, thus making the representation of time a difficult matter to deal
with. In order to tackle this issue, different approaches have been proposed in
the literature (see inter al.
Flouris 2008, Makri
2011): Temporal Description logics [Artale and Franconi 2000]
[Lutz et al. 2008], Versioning [Klein and Fensel 2001], Reification
[Kanmani 2016] and 4D-fluents [Welty et al. 2006]. In
the following, a brief description of each approach is provided.
Temporal Description Logics (TDL). Description
logics (DLs) [Baader et al. 2003]
[Baader and Sattler 2001]
[Calvanese et al. 2001] are a family of knowledge representation
formalisms underlying the Ontology Web Language (OWL-DL). They are a decidable
subset of first-order logic. TDLs extend DL with standard temporal logic
operators such as “always in the future”, and “until”. Many TDLs have been proposed in the literature
[Artale and Franconi 2000]
[Lutz et al. 2008] with the most expressive of them being undecidable.
Extending DL entails to extend OWL, which is based on DL. Since OWL is a W3C
recommendation (2004) for publishing and sharing ontologies in a “Semantic Web vision”, adopting TDL would entail to
abandon the Semantic Web framework. On the contrary, the other approaches
described in the following can be implemented using OWL directly.
Versioning. Another strategy commonly adopted to handle and keep
track of ontology modifications in time is versioning: whenever a change takes
place, a new version of the resource is created (see Figure 1). Several works
are grounded on this approach: Grandi (2009)
presents a multi-temporal RDF database model employing triple timestamping with
temporal elements; Zekri et al. (2017) present an
infrastructure and a suite of tools to support the creation and validation of
OWL ontologies with time-varying instances; in Tappolet and Bernstein (2009), the usage of Named Graphs is
proposed.
The drawback of versioning approach is mainly twofold. Firstly, the fact that a
new version of the whole resource needs to be created every time a change occurs
leads to redundant information. Secondly, the more numerous the versions of the
resource are, the more complex and time-consuming the performance of exhaustive
searches becomes.
Figure 1.
Versioning - when a change takes place, a new version of the
resource is created.Reification. Reification is a technique for representing
relationships with arity greater than two.[8] Reifying a
relationship means representing it as a class of entities. The N-ary Relations
pattern, conceived to model a relationship as a resource, is based on
reification.
Figure 2.
Example related to the fact that the sense of the term ti denotes the concept cj: (a) example of reification - (b)
example of N-ary relation pattern.Figure 2(a) illustrates how the reification process works: the relation
denotes is transformed into a class, here named Reified relation. The subject and the object of
denotes, as well as the relation itself, become the attributes
of the new class. Let us suppose that the relation denotes links a
term ti (in particular its specific sense) to a
concept cj at a specific time T0. As shown in Figure 2(b), the relationship denotes(ti, cj, T0) can be reified as the new class DenotationEvent with three binary relations:
denotes(ti, de), denotes(de,
cj), and time(de, T0). The first two relations link ti to cj by means of de, which is an instance of the class DenotationEvent. The third relation assigns a temporal
extent T0 to de,
representing the temporal validity of the original property
denotes(ti, cj).
The main disadvantages of this technique are that: i) the complexity of the
ontology increases due to the proliferation of entities, both classes and
properties (as a matter of fact, whenever a temporal relation has to be
represented, a new object is created); ii) the OWL reasoning capabilities become
limited [Welty et al. 2006] and can be maintained only by means of
time-consuming strategies, since the reified property is transformed into a
class and the characteristics which can be added to a property in OWL (such as
functionality, inverse functionality, transitivity or symmetry) are no longer
associated directly with the relation itself.
4D-fluents (four-dimensionalist). The basic idea underlying this
approach is that each entity has a temporal part, described by a set of time
slices. Each slice represents a temporal period, in which all the features of an
entity remain constant. Changes affect the properties of the temporal part
keeping the entity unchanged. In order to add the time dimension to a resource,
the TimeSlice and TimeInterval classes with the timeSliceOf
and timeInterval properties need to be introduced,
as Figure 3 depicts. Returning to the previous example, in the 4D-fluents
approach, the property denotes would connect instances of the
TimeSlice class and would hold between slices
of entities. The time slices of an entity have a specific lifetime, that is the
time interval of the relation they participate in.
As in the N-ary model so also in the 4-D fluents approach the domain and the
range of the property denotes change, both represented by the
TimeSlice class. So, this model as well suffers
from some limitations in OWL reasoning capabilities. With respect to the N-ary
model, the 4-D fluents approach is affected by a wider proliferation of entities
(compare the blue objects in Figure 2).
Figure 3.
Example of 4D-fluents representation.So far, the main mechanisms for representing time evolving information were
illustrated. In the next two subsections, we present a vocabulary to represent
time-related facts, i.e. OWL-Time, and a set of rules, i.e. SWRL, which operate
on temporal relations to infer new temporal knowledge and to detect inconsistent
assertions.
4.1 OWL-Time and Allen’s Relations
OWL-Time[9] is an ontology of
temporal concepts, conceived to describe the temporal properties of
resources. It provides a vocabulary for expressing facts about topological
relations among instants and intervals, together with information about
durations and date-time. Figure 4(a) illustrates a diagram of OWL-Time
ontology. The properties hasTemporalDuration,
hasBeginning, hasEnd, and hasTime provide a
standard way to attach time information to ontological entities.
Let us consider, for example, that the term ti
denotes the concept cj from 1898 to 1903. In this
case all the needed temporal facts can be specified using OWL-Time
vocabulary.
However, if we wanted to answer questions like “What are
the intervals overlapping the interval 1898-1903?”, or “what are the relations holding in that interval?”,
OWL-Time vocabulary would not be enough. James F. Allen (1983) provided then a calculus for temporal
reasoning, by introducing thirteen base relations capturing the possible
relations between two intervals (see Figure 4(b)). They allow the
computation of any relative position or sequence. In the context of the
Semantic Web, these rules can be represented by means of the Semantic Web
Rule Language (SWRL), described in the following section. The use of this
language makes it possible to assert new instances of relationships between
the ontology entities.
Figure 4.
(a) OWL-Time - the core model of temporal entities. (b) Allen’s rules
between time periods.4.2 Semantic Web Rule Language
Semantic Web Rule Language[10] (SWRL) is a
language based on a subset of Datalog with both unary and binary predicates,
representing the rule layer within the Semantic Web stack. The form of these
rules is an implication between an antecedent (body) and a consequent
(head), each consisting of zero or a conjunction of more atoms.[11] Whenever the conditions
specified in the antecedent hold, then the conditions specified in the
consequent must hold as well. Atoms can be of the form C(x), P(x,y),
sameAs(x,y), differentFrom(x,y), or builtIn(r,x,...) where C is
an OWL description or data range, P is an OWL property,
r is a built-in relation, x and y
are either variables or OWL individuals or OWL data values, as appropriate.
For example, the following SWRL rule infers if an instant i1 is before an instant i2, by verifying a set of premises:
Instant(?i1) ∧ Instant(?i2) ∧ inXSDDateTime(?i1, ?y) ∧
inXSDDateTime(?i2, ?w) ∧
swrl:lessThan(?y, ?w)
→ before(?i2, ?i1)
swrl:lessThan(?y, ?w)
→ before(?i2, ?i1)
where the built-in swrl:lessThan(?y, ?w) is satisfied when the date
represented by the variable ?y is earlier than that represented by
?w.[12] In this case,
when temporal information is provided as a date, the qualitative relations
are specified using SWRL rules that apply on the quantitative
representation. The rules can be applied to qualitative temporal information
as well. In the following, a rule about the relation during is
provided:
ProperInterval(?a) ∧ ProperInterval(?x) ∧ before(?b, ?y) ∧ before(?z, ?c) ∧
hasBeginning(?a, ?b) ∧ hasBeginning(?x, ?y) ∧ hasEnd(?a, ?c) ∧ hasEnd(?x, ?z)
→ During(?x, ?a)
hasBeginning(?a, ?b) ∧ hasBeginning(?x, ?y) ∧ hasEnd(?a, ?c) ∧ hasEnd(?x, ?z)
→ During(?x, ?a)
5. Adding Time to Terminologies
Given the different approaches to modelling time described in the previous
section, we chose to adopt the N-ary model.
The reason for this choice is twofold. First of all, the N-ary relations approach
is supported by the Ontology Engineering and Patterns Task Force of the Semantic
Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group.[13] Secondly, with
respect to the perdurantist approach, the N-ary model requires the introduction
of a smaller number of objects and thus “outperforms the
4D-fluents representation in terms of required assertions (axioms) and
consequently in reasoning time”
[Batsakis et al. 2017, 14].
In order to formalize terminology evolution following the N-ary approach, we took
inspiration from the model introduced by Preventis et al. (2014)[14] to handle temporal
ontologies in OWL. In particular, we introduced the following entities:
- the class Event, which represents the reification of a property holding in a certain time. To model the class Event we used the relative type dcmitype:Event taken from the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) and defined as a “non-persistent, time-based occurrence”[15];
- the object property during, having the class dcmitype:Event as domain and the class time:ProperInterval of the OWL-Time ontology as range. The latter is defined as “a temporal entity with non-zero extent or duration, i.e. for which the value of the beginning and end are different”.[16] during has been modelled as a sub-property of dcterms:date (described as a “point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource”) of the DCMI vocabulary[17];
- the object property temporalProperty, which relates individuals of the class dcmitype:Event respectively to the source and to the target individuals of the original property which has been reified. As we will see in detail shortly, the object properties that are converted into temporal ones are formalised as sub-properties of temporalProperty.
Following the N-ary approach outlined above, the terminological layer of our
model was formalised by extending the lemon model. The model does
not contain a complete collection of linguistic categories; consequently, it
builds on Lexinfo ontology[18]
in order to provide a vocabulary to describe the properties of linguistic
objects. More specifically, the four lexico-semantic relationships defined in
Lexinfo, namely synonymy, antonymy, hypernymy, hyponymy[19] were
“temporalised” (temporalSynonym, temporalAntonym,
temporalHypernym, and temporalHyponym) and thus converted into sub-properties of temporalProperty to indicate their involvement in a
temporal event. The same was done for the properties ontolex:reference, which links every individual of the ontolex:LexicalSense class to a concept defined in an
ontology, and ontolex:sense, linking an individual
of the class ontolex:LexicalEntry to a specific
sense.
In addition, each of these relations was reified and converted into subclasses of
the class dcmitype:Event: senseEvent representing the reification of sense relation, referenceEvent representing the reification of the
relation linking a sense and an ontology concept, equivalentEvent, incompatibleEvent,
broaderEvent, narrowerEvent representing respectively the reification of
synonymy, antonymy, hypernymy, hyponymy relations holding between two
senses.
The class dcmitype:Event as well as its subclasses
mentioned above are related to the class time:ProperInterval through the object property
during.
So, for example, in order to represent the temporal synonymy (Figure 5), the
class equivalentEvent is related to the class
time:ProperInterval through the relation temporalSynonym, specifying the time period in which
the relation of synonymy holds between two senses.
As we can see, the introduction of an intermediate object, namely the individual
of the class equivalentEvent, splits the static
relation linking a subject and an object into two parts. Instead of a single
triple linking two senses (s1 sense
s2), two triples are created, in
which the individual of the class equivalentEvent
appears as subject in one case and as object in the other.
Figure 5.
Synonymy is represented as a temporal event that occurs during an
interval: sense sa of a certain
lexical entry is asserted to be synonym of sense sb of another lexical entry in a specific time interval
i.However, this is not enough. As we underlined above, to define in which period a
term is used with a certain sense and to denote a specific concept, scholars
need to resort to textual sources.
As a result, our model is based on the key concept of attestation; more
specifically, the senses of a term are linked to the text where they are
attested, and for each text the writing time is defined by means of specific
relations. To represent texts and attestations, as the main entities
constituting the textual layer of our model, we introduced the following
entities:
- the class Text, which represents every work produced in a written form. As many methodological and theoretical works have underlined over the years, the notion of text is highly complex and culturally rich and, thus, difficult to define and formalize. A detailed discussion is beyond the scope of this article. The term “text” is to be understood here in a broad sense, including entities that are very different from each other, such as books, published articles, handwritten notes, drafts of unfinished works etc. It can be considered equivalent to the type “Text” as defined in the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Type Vocabulary (dcmitype:Text), namely a “resource whose content is primarily words for reading”.[20] If scholars need to use vocabularies providing more subtle distinctions, many models for representing documents in Linked Data have been already proposed, offering an opportunity for high quality bibliographic data to be exposed to the Semantic Web, such as FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) [Carlyle 2011] or Bibframe (Bibliographic Framework) [Kroeger 2013]. Importantly enough, if a different vocabulary is adopted, the validity of our model is not compromised;
- the object property hasAttestation, which relates a sense, instance of the class ontolex:LexicalSense, to an instance of the class dcmitype:Text; a few works about the modeling of the attestation of a term in a document have been already done [Khan et al. 2017] [Bellandi et al. 2017]; for the sake of reuse of existing vocabularies we adopted the hasAttestation property defined by the LAWD (Linked Ancient World Data) ontology[21];
- the object property hasWritingTime, defined as a subproperty of dcterms:date, which relates an individual of the class dcmitype:Text to an individual belonging to the class time:ProperInterval of the OWL-Time ontology.
In most cases, on the contrary, temporal information on the writing process is
vague and ambiguous and partially bounded intervals (“before
X”, “after Y”, etc.) need to be defined.
Instead of specifying the exact duration or the starting and ending points in
time, scholars describe intervals with respect to their mutual relations, by
establishing the terminus post quem or the terminus ante
quem, namely the limits of the possible range of dates in which a
work has been written.[22]
As for published texts, instead of the hasWritingTime property, the dcterms:issued[23] can be used, with the year
of publication constituting the end of the drafting period.
An overview of the model is illustrated in Figure 6.
Figure 6.
Overview of the proposed model. (a) the textual layer is constituted by
texts and attestation. (b) the terminological layer relies on a N-ary
version of lemon, where each reified class is an event having a
temporal extent. (c) the ontological layer concerns the formal definitions
of the concepts denoted by the terms and it is described with OWL.To take maximum advantage of the adoption of OWL as the representation language
of the resource, we have also conceived a set of SWRL rules to automatize the
attribution of some temporal information.
The following rule states that, if a sense is attested in a text written in a
certain time interval, then that sense “exists” during the
same interval.
Text(?t) ^ time:ProperInterval(?i) ^ hasWritingTime(?t, ?i) ^
ontolex:LexicalEntry(?l) ^ ontolex:LexicalSense(?s)
^ isAttestedIn(?s, ?t) ^ ontolex:sense(?l, ?s) ^
swrlx:createOWLThing(?se, ?s)
⇾ senseEvent(?se) ^ temporalSense(?l, ?se) ^ temporalSense(?se, ?s) ^ during(?se, ?i)
^ isAttestedIn(?s, ?t) ^ ontolex:sense(?l, ?s) ^
swrlx:createOWLThing(?se, ?s)
⇾ senseEvent(?se) ^ temporalSense(?l, ?se) ^ temporalSense(?se, ?s) ^ during(?se, ?i)
More specifically, given a text t written in a time interval
i (defined as an instance of time:ProperInterval),
and given a lexical entry l with a lexical sense s
(these two related to each other through the synchronic ontolex:sense relation)
attested in text t, then l has sense s
(in a diachronic perspective) during the interval i. The premise of
the rule is composed of the following steps: i) an anonymous individual
se is created ex novo in the antecedent part of
the rule using the createOWLThing built-in relation[24];
ii) se is defined, in the consequent part, as an event representing
the reified relation (in particular by instantiating it as a member of the class
senseEvent); iii) the property temporalSense is
used to relate the lexical entry l to se and, in turn,
to relate se to sense s; iv) finally, the event
se is defined as happening in the same time interval
i during which the text has been written.
If the sense of a lexical entry is attested in more than one text (each one
written in a specific temporal interval), the rule will be fired for each text,
thus relating the lexical entry to that sense in a more complex period
constituted of multiple time intervals.
Similarly, the temporal validity of the ontolex:reference relation,
linking each ontolex:LexicalSense to one and only one concept of an
ontology, can be inferred from the writing time of the text as well, using the
following SWRL rule:
Text(?t) ^ time:ProperInterval(?i) ^ hasWritingTime(?t, ?int) ^
ontolex:LexicalSense(?s) ^ isAttestedIn(?s, ?t) ^ Concept(?c) ^ ontolex:reference(?s,
?c) ^ swrlx:createOWLThing(?re, ?c)
⇾ referenceEvent(?re) ^ temporalReference(?s, ?re) ^ temporalReference(?re, ?c) ^
during(?re, ?i)
ontolex:LexicalSense(?s) ^ isAttestedIn(?s, ?t) ^ Concept(?c) ^ ontolex:reference(?s,
?c) ^ swrlx:createOWLThing(?re, ?c)
⇾ referenceEvent(?re) ^ temporalReference(?s, ?re) ^ temporalReference(?re, ?c) ^
during(?re, ?i)
If a sense s is linked to a concept c through the
(synchronic) ontolex:reference property, and if s is
attested in a specific text t written in the time interval
i, then, in a diachronic perspective, the relation reference
holds in the same time interval i as well. In other words, the fact
that a word is used with a particular sense in a specific text is equivalent to
saying that in that period that term was used to express that specific
concept.
Figures 7 and 8 show respectively how the temporal versions of ontolex relations
ontolex:sense and ontolex:reference can be
automatically inferred by a reasoner and represented in our N-ary model starting
from the writing time of texts.
Figure 7.
Classes and properties appearing in solid lines constitute the synchronic
part of the resource. Elements in dashed lines, representing the temporal
version of the ontolex:sense relation, can be automatically
implied by the firing of the SWRL rule.
Figure 8.
Temporalization via reification of the ontolex:reference relation.We are also working at defining other rules taking into account the relations of
synonymy, antonymy, hypernymy, and hyponymy, with the aim of automatizing the
creation of their diachronic counterparts, with the addition of Allen’s
relations described in Section 4.1.
6. The Construction of a Diachronic Resource: the Saussure Case Study
Ferdinand de Saussure (Geneva, 1857-1913), the father of general linguistics,
never published his theories on general linguistics and semiotics in an organic
work. He strove to structure the flow of his thoughts and ideas in handwritten
notes, which are often characterized by a synthetic, fragmentary and hermetic
nature. These manuscripts display an obsessive and constant search for clear,
effective and unambiguous terms, against the “ineptie de la
terminologie courante” (Letter to Meillet written in 1984, see Benveniste 1964). He changed the meaning to
some terms over time, assigned additional specific meanings to already existing
terms, used some expressions ephemerally, and even forged new words. This
terminological fluctuation reflects the difficulties underlying every process of
theoretical creation and sheds light on the evolutionary dynamics through which
concepts take shape and cut through language to finally find their linguistic
expression. This process of rumination
[Fenoglio 2012] is typical when dealing with theoretical
terminologies as in the case of Saussure, who tries to revolutionize the current
linguistic vision and to lay the foundations of linguistics as a science.
Saussure’s terminology has been the subject of numerous studies [Godel 1957]
[Engler 1968]
[Cosenza 2016]. In 2011 the first electronic thesaurus of
Saussure's terminology, named Simple_FdS
[Ruimy et al. 2013], was built as part of the project “Per una edizione digitale dei manoscritti di F. de
Saussure”, coordinated by then President of the Cercle Ferdinand de
Saussure Daniele Gambarara.
The architecture of Simple_FdS was based on the
lexical model SIMPLE [Lenci et al. 2000] and was therefore inspired by
the Generative Lexicon theory elaborated by Pustejovsky (1995). The Generative Lexicon theory, mainly
applied to general language, has proved to be very effective in the description
of specialized language and terminological lexicons as well (for example Aráuz et al. 2012, Sánchez Ibáñez and García Palacios 2014),
as it makes it possible to enrich the range of conceptual relations which is
traditionally based on generic-specific and part-whole relations.
Initially, the electronic lexicon was conceived as static and no diachronic
aspects were taken into account. Recently, as we shall illustrate in Section
6.1, the model here proposed has been adopted to convert this terminological
resource from a static repository into a dynamic one.
As underlined in Section 2, in diachronic terminology the textual dimension plays
a crucial role. Consequently, the first step was to build a good corpus, able to
represent the diachronic evolution we want to study. The texts included in
Saussure’s corpus can be considered as highly representative of diachronic
evolution of Saussure’s terminology, embracing all the thirty-seven years in
which the intellectual activity of the Genevan linguist unfolded. The period
covered by the corpus ranges from 1874 - when Saussure wrote his first Essai pour réduire les mots du grec, du latin & de
l'allemand à un petit nombre de racines - until 1911, the year in
which he took the third course of general linguistics, the last academic
teaching held before his death, which occurred in 1913 after a long illness.
Let us see in detail an example of the formalisation of the terminological
changes occurring in Saussure's writings.
6.1 Temporalizing Saussure's Terminology: the Case of Signe
As is well known, Saussure's theories have been particularly influential in
semiotic studies. He emphasized first the dyadic and complex nature of
linguistic sign, which consists of two heterogeneous entities: a signifier
(signifiant), namely the hearer’s psychological
impression of a sound, and a signified (signifié), i.e. a
concept, an abstract idea. This terminology - still in use today - was
introduced by the Genevan linguist at the end of his life, after a long
theoretical reflection emerging in many of his handwritten pages.
Here, as an example, the concept of SIGNIFIER was chosen and the formal
representation of the different terms Saussure used over time to designate
this concept is illustrated, in accordance with the N-ary model we propose
here. In the following, the relationships and the classes taken from
existing standard vocabularies will be indicated with prefixes of the
respective vocabularies.
The concept of SIGNIFIER is denoted by many different terms in Saussurean
manuscripts, such as signe, image
acoustique, image verbale, image
vocale, image auditive,
son, forme. More specifically, the
term signe is attested intermittently from 1891 to 1911 in many works, such
as De la double essence du langage, Status et Motus,
Notes Item, Troisième Cours de linguistique générale etc. To
formally represent this, the instance signe_sense, belonging to
the ontolex:LexicalSense class, was created and linked - by
means of the relation isAttestedIn - to the instances of the
class dcmitype:Text representing all the works where the term
occurs. The writing period of each text was formally defined. Here the case
of Double Essence du language is shown. The
instance Double_Essence_Writing_Time of the class
time:ProperInterval (subclass of
time:Interval) was created and linked to the instance
Double_Essence through the relation
hasWritingTime. The writing interval of this work, which is
supposed to range from 1891 to 1892,[25] was formally
defined by linking the instance Double_Essence_Writing_Time
through the relation time:hasBeginning to an instance of the
class time:Instant, defined by the Data Property
XSDDateTime with value “1891-01-01T00:00:00” as well as through the relation
time:hasEnd to an instance of the class
time:Instant, defined by the Data Property
XSDDateTime with value “1892-12-31T00:00:00”. The same formalisation was performed for
each work where this sense of signe was attested.
As described in Section 5, on the basis of the N-ary approach here adopted,
ontolex relations were reified and the following classes were introduced as
subclass of dcmitype:Event: broaderEvent
(reification of the hypernym relation); narrowerEvent
(reification of the hyponym relation); incompatibleEvent
(reification of the antonymy relation); equivalentEvent
(reification of the synonymy relation), referenceEvent
(reification of the inter-level relation reference) and finally
senseEvent (reification of the relation linking a lexical
entry to its senses).
By firing the two rules illustrated in Section 5, the classes
referenceEvent and senseEvent were
automatically populated. More specifically, in accordance with the first
rule, the instance signe_sense_ts was created and linked by
means of the relation temporalSense both to
signe_sense (individual of the
ontolex:LexicalSense class) and to signe_entry
(individual of the ontolex:LexicalEntry class). Similarly, by
firing the second rule, the individual
signe_sense_ref_signifiant_concept was created and linked
by the relation temporalReference both to
signe_sense and to an ontology concept, described in the
Simple_FdS ontology.
As underlined above, a terminological fluctuation can be observed in
Saussure's work as regard to the designation of the concept SIGNIFIER.
An attempt to completely renew semiotic terminology is attested in the
so-called Notes Items. In these handwritten
pages, defined by Stetter (1979) as a
“fragment sémiologique central”, Saussure’s
reflection upon linguistic sign achieved extraordinary theoretical heights.
Many heterodox neologisms were introduced, such as sème,
sème linguistique, aposème,
kenôme, sôme,
contre-sôme etc. Here the
“material” part of linguistic sign, namely the
“signifier”, is denoted in certain passages by the
term aposème. This terminology is abandoned later and the
term signe continues to be used to indicate at the same
time the “material” part of the linguistic sign and the
whole, namely the combination of SIGNIFIED (concept) and SIGNIFIER (acoustic
image). In order to avoid the confusion that the polysemy of the term
signe generated in his students, Saussure introduced
in extremis the term signifiant,
during his last course on general linguistics in 1911. He proposed thus to
retain the word signe to designate the linguistic entity
as a whole, and to replace the dyad signe and
concept respectively by signifiant and
signifié.
To formalise this terminological fluctuation, the instance
signe_sense_syn_aposème_sense of the
equivalentEvent class was created and the static triple
(signe_sense
lexinfo:synonymy aposème_sense) was split into the following
two triples in accordance with the N-ary model: (signe temporalSynonym
signe_sense_syn_aposème_sense) and
(signe_sense_syn_aposème_sense temporalSynonym aposème).
The instance signe_sense_syn_aposème_sense was then linked to
the interval Notes_Item_Writing_Interval by means of the
relation during.
In a similar way, the instance signe_sense_syn_signifiant_sense
of the equivalentEvent class was created and linked via
temporalSynonym to the individual signifiant.
The instance signe was in turn linked - by means of the same
relation - to the instance signe_sense_syn_signifiant_sense,
belonging to the reified class equivalentEvent. Finally, the
instance was linked to the interval troisième_Cours_Interval
(with beginning 1910 and end 1911) by means of the relation
during.
6.2 Querying Saussure's Diachronic Terminology
Such a formalization, even if complex and redundant, makes it possible to
reconstruct on a timeline the evolution of the lexical-semantic
relationships between senses as well as the relations holding between senses
and concepts, and then to answer complex and sophisticated queries. Here are
just a few of the many queries which can be performed:
- Which are the terms used over time to denote a concept c?
- Which are the terms attested in a specific time interval i and used to denote a concept c?
- Which are the terms attested in a specific time interval i which are synonym (antonym or hypernym or hyponym) of the term t?
- Which are the terms synonyms of the term t in a specific text T?
- Which are the concepts denoted by the term t over time?
- Which are the concepts denoted by the term t in a specific time interval i?
Returning to our Saussure’s case study, let us suppose, for example, that
scholars would like to know which terms have been used by the Genevan
linguist over time as synonyms of the term signe (in the
sense of signe linguistique, namely “l’union de l’idée avec ce produit phonatoire”).
The query results are represented here in the form of a graph (Figure 9), as
they appear in LexO, a collaborative web editor of lexical and
termino-ontological resources, developed by the Institute of Computational
Linguistics of the Italian National Research Council (ILC-CNR) and already
used within several research projects, such as DiTMAO [Bellandi et al. 2018] and Totus Mundus [Piccini 2018].[26]
Figure 9.
The synonyms of the term signe used by Saussure
between 1890 and 1911As clearly appears in the graph, the formalization previously described makes
it emerge immediately Saussure’s unceasing and obsessive work in search for
the term that best represented the concept.
In an initial period, spanning approximately from 1891 and 1892, Saussure
introduces three interesting neologisms: signe-idée,
son-idée and forme-sens. These
three nominal compounds well reflect the fact that the linguistic sign is
composed of two parts that are closely connected as the two sides of a piece
of paper. In effect, the bipartite structure of the terms mirrors the dyadic
nature of the linguistic sign. Each element of the compound denotes one of
the two parts composing the linguistic sign. More specifically, the first
constituent of the compound refers to the signifier, i.e. the sound-image
(signe, son,
forme), while the second element denotes the
conceptual side, the idea conveyed by the sign (idée,
sens).
Later, in a time span ranging from 1899 to 1903, Saussure renames
signe as sème and distinguishes it
from its “material” constituent, named
aposème or sôme and from its
conceptual part, designated as parasôme or
contre- sôme, thus introducing a constellation of
neologisms derived from ancient Greek, as is usual in scientific
terminology. All these neologisms are abandoned and no longer adopted by the
Genevan linguist who prefers to continue using more traditional terms such
as mot, terme, signe
linguistique. These terms are all attested in the third course
of general linguistics held by Saussure in Geneva between 1910 and 1911.
Here Saussure definitely chooses the term signe to
indicate the whole resulting from the association of form, named
signifiant, and meaning, named
signifié, thus resolving the ambiguity that until
then had characterized the term signe: “L'ambiguïté disparaîtrait si l'on désignait les trois
notions ici en présence par des noms qui s'appellent les uns les autres
tout en s'opposant. Nous proposons de conserver le mot signe pour
désigner le total, et de remplacer concept et image acoustique
respectivement par signifié et signifiant; ces derniers termes ont
l’avantage de marquer l’opposition qui les sépare soit entre eux, soit
du total dont ils font partie. [...]”
[Saussure 1972, 99].
Another query focussing on the period of attestation of the term
signe in all its meanings brings out this ambiguity
more clearly, as illustrated in Figure 10.
Figure 10.
The attestation period of the term signe in its
three meanings.The green bar represents the period in which every sense is attested;
clicking on it in LexO interface the complete list of all the works where
the term occurs is provided.
As the graph shows, signe is used in the same period - and in
the same texts - with two different meanings, namely to indicate the most
“concrete” part of the linguistic sign
(signe sense-2) as well as to denote the union of a
concept and a form (signe sense-3).[27] This polysemy
generates ambiguity, and – as we know – ambiguity should be strongly avoided
in terminology where, according to GTT, the term must be monosemic and the
concept unambiguous. Saussure is aware of this and therefore during his last
course on general linguistics – and more precisely on May 19 1911 – proposes
to preserve the term signe in its third sense and to
replace it with the neologism signifiant as for the
second meaning.
As Saussure’s case study demonstrates, models and tools devoted to
representing and querying diachronic terminological resources play a crucial
role in order to better understand the terminological fluctuation and the
mobile and progressive conceptualisation which characterize some unstable
phases of science.
7. Conclusion and Next Steps
Representing the diachronic evolution of terminological and conceptual data in a
formal way constitutes a challenge, since standard formalisms adopted in the
Semantic Web for the representation of data have mainly been conceived for
static and monotonic information.
In this work we have proposed a Semantic Web-based model for representing in an
explicit and formal way the diachronic evolution of concepts and terms in a
given domain, accompanied by a concrete use case focussing on the evolution of
linguistic terminology as attested in Ferdinand De Saussure’s writings. The
temporalization approach illustrated here is domain independent and can be
virtually applied to any RDF data model. The main drawback is that such an
approach requires a significant design effort in modelling and encoding specific
sets of temporal rules. In addition, the properties to be temporalized need to
be already known at the modelling time. However, in slightly
“controlled” domains like terminology and lexicography,
our approach turns out to be effective to describe the historical development of
a language, and its many temporal variations.
The next research objectives are: i) the enrichment of the model, ii) the
exploitation of the resource, iii) the extension of the tool LexO to support the
construction of diachronic resources [Bellandi et al. 2018].[28]
As far as the enrichment of the model is concerned, we plan to design new SWRL
rules for the automatic temporalization of lexico-semantic properties holding
between senses, such as synonymy, antonymy etc.
In addition, in order to manage the cases when the writing period of a text is
uncertain, we intend to develop an algorithm exploiting the resource for
automatic dating suggestion: the behaviour of terms in those texts, whose
writing time is known, will be used to advance hypotheses on the uncertain (or
even unknown) writing time periods of the other texts belonging to the corpus
under analysis. Needless to say, the accuracy of suggested time periods will be
proportionate to the amount of (certain) temporal information already encoded in
the diachronic resource.
Finally, we are working to extend the tool LexO as to include the management of
texts and temporal information. The tool will be designed to relieve scholars
from the time consuming (and prone to errors) task of formalising the large
amount of entities required to represent the temporal information according to
the N-ary model. In addition, thanks to LexO scholars will not be required to
manage the formalisms and the languages underlying the Web Semantic technologies
such as RDF and OWL.
The first extension of the tool LexO aimed at the inclusion of temporal
information will involve the integration of functions for the management of
text. As discussed in Section 2, diachronic terminology is a textual
terminology, and terms have to be analysed in their contexts of use. For this
reason, LexO will be equipped with a module through which users will be able to
import their documents and the relative time information (writing time, date of
publishing, etc.), organize them into folders, browse them and link each encoded
term to the relative attestations in the corpus.
Notes
[1] The term terminology is here to be
understood as the set of “lexical items belonging to
specialized areas of usage of one or more languages”
[Sager 1990, 2].
[2] “Clavius on the Web”
[Piccini 2016], “Per un'edizione digitale
dei manoscritti di Ferdinand de Saussure”
[Ruimy et al. 2013], and “Totus Mundus”
[Piccini 2017].
[4] According
to Gruber (1991: 199), “an ontology is a specification of a conceptualization”.
[6] https://lemon-model.net/ and https://www.w3.org/2016/05/ontolex/ for details, see McCrae et al. (2017)
[7] Please refer to https://www.w3.org/2016/05/ontolex/#core
[11] Rules
having conjunctive consequents could easily be transformed into multiple
rules each with an atomic consequent.
[12] For a complete built-ins list, please refer to Section 8 in
https://www.w3.org/Submission/SWRL/.
[14] The
plug-in for Protégé CHRONOS, devoted to creating and editing temporal
ontologies in OWL, is based on this model.
[18] Please refer to https://www.lexinfo.net/
[19] In this paper, we
considered exclusively these properties. Other lexico-semantic properties
can be taken into account as well, for example translation defined in
Lexinfo vocabulary (see https://www.lexinfo.net/ontology/3.0/lexinfo).
[22] It is important to underline that every relation
defined by the scholar is - by default - considered valid for the entire
time interval of the reference corpus.
[25] See Saussure’s letter to Gaston
Paris (30 December 1891). On the date of this manuscript, see Gambarara
(2009).
[26] For the time being, LexO supports the uploading of diachronic
resources, which are built according to the N-ary model, and offers a
Question Answering system, implemented
as a user-friendly interface composed of several controlled natural
language templates. Each template makes it possible to formulate a query
in controlled natural language thanks to dropdown menus. For further
extensions of the tool LexO, see Section 7.
[27] Signe
sense-1 refers to any material entity to which we
associate a sense. This meaning is not taken into account here, as not
relevant for the purposes of this discussion.
[28] The
most recent stable version of LexO is available at https://github.com/andreabellandi/LexO-lite.
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