Fast food for thought:
on truth, negotiation and
prosody
Dafydd Gibbon
Universität Bielefeld
Europe
Wikifying Research: Leipzig: Towards collaborative content management of interpretations, hypotheses, and theories
The storyboard
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I am writing an article on RHYTHM in Anyi.
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I have a deadline, so it has to be QUICK
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I need to find recent literature, using various internet
facilities including online library metadata
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BUT
– We have a “linguistics problem of linguistics”: ● terminology
– The organisation of topic domains has weird structures
●
SO
– think about document prodduction from the point of view of a (COMPUTATIONAL) TEXT LINGUIST:
Overview
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FAST FOOD FOR THOUGHT
– FAST: wiki wiki ...
– FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Uses of an encyclopedia
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TRUTH
– Truth conditions and accountability
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NEGOTIATION
– Negotiation: interaction and functionality
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THE PROBLEM OF COMPLEXITY
– Linguists are tree-huggers
http://www.comeinandburn.com/disco/images/covers/fastfood.gif
FAST: wiki wiki ...
●
Check Wikipedia for “wiki”...
– A wiki (IPA: [wIki:] or [wI:ki:]) is a website that allows visitors to add, remove, and edit content.
– But then, what comes up is linguistics, specifically Hawaiian pidgin:
● “wiki” means “quick” and the “wiki wiki” is a local bus ● “Wikipedia” sounds better than “Quickipedia”
●
Hence my title:
– “Fast food for thought” as an answer to the question: – “What is the function of an encyclopedia?”
FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Uses of an encyclopedia
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Information:
– to offer truth
– to provide “the facts”
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Ideally:
– completeness – accuracy
– reliability – actuality
●
The quickie function:
– to offer truth, the facts – and do this QUICKLY
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But an encyclopedia
does not give the full
spectrum of scientific
diversity:
– print: inevitably out-of-date
– wikipedia etc.: self-selection
What is there? - Wiki as a specific concept
●
Major wikis:
– Wikipedia
– Scholarpedia – Bielepedia
☺
– ...●
Metadata “wikis”?
– Citeseer – OLAC
– [ Ethnologue? ] – ...
●
BLARKS
●
Defined by available Wiki
engines?
– 480 engines counted – Wiki Engines
– each with its own interaction model
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So what do we mean by
“wiki”?
– specific model?
– generic metaphor for interactive websites?
What is there? - Wiki as a generic concept
●
Google & Co:
– hybrid full text search
●
Moderated proto-wikis:
– collaborative databases
● VerbMobil HyprLex DB 1990s
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Semi-collaborative wikis
– blogs with comments
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Social/individual wikis:
– Myspace, Youtube,...
●
E-bay as wiki
☺
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Pedias:
– unstructured set with internal and external cross-references
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Content pedias:
– Wikipedia
– Scholarpedia – ...
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Metadata pedias:
– Citeseer – OLAC
Truth conditions and accountability?
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Naive assessment:
– The function of an
encyclopedia is to offer the truth about some topic.
– There is a guarantor of the truth.
●
But the danger is:
– “container metaphor” for knowledge (Lakoff &
Truth conditions and accountability?
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Naive assessment:
– The function of an
encyclopedia is to offer the truth about some topic.
– There is a guarantor of the truth.
●
Logicians have taught us
about ...
– correspondence theory – coherence theory
– consensus theory
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Correspondence theory:
– Popper taught us about written “objective
knowledge”
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Coherence theory:
– Engineers taught us about things that work
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Consensus theory:
– Kuhn taught us about scientific paradigms – More recently: truth
construction through negotiation
NEGOTIATION
Negotiation: interaction and functionality
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The usual DC metadata
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But a document characterisation is required which is
– enhanced with functional linguistic categories – for which useful traditional models exist
● e.g. the Jakobson (1960) model (cf. also discourse analysis...)
●
And thus goes much further than the basic document
categories of structure and dual interpretation:
– CONTENT (logical form)
– STRUCTURE (text grammar)
Negotiation: interaction and functionality
CONTACT / CHANNEL CONTEXT
RECEIVER SENDER
MESSAGE
expressive
representational
phatic
poetic metalingual
conative / appellative
Negotiation: interaction and functionality
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expressive
– success of result – qualification
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conative
– credibility – acceptance
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representational
– theory: explanation,... – model: objects,
relations...
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metalingual
– language: English? Local?
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phatic
– contact start, finish, sustention
– bonding, user loyalty
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poetic
– aesthetic (layout design)
Negotiation: interaction and functionality
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Senders
– author
– custodian
– editor / moderator – peer / any reviewer
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Contexts / channels / codes
– Trustworthy repositories? – Sustainability?
– Interoperability? – Web?
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Receivers
– productive senders ● author
● ...
– potential senders ● expert reader
Negotiation: interaction and functionality
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Participants in knowledge exchange:
– Peers?
– Moderators? – Maintainers?
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Contexts / codes / channels for knowledge exchange:
– Trustworthy repositories? – Sustainability?
– Interoperability? – Web?
THE PROBLEM OF COMPLEXITY
The atomisation of meaning (Bolinger)
●
Current wikis contain
– metadata and metaprocedures (search) – arbitrary sets of terms (not “concepts”)
– with simple (asymmetrical, intransitive, irreflexive) relations defined over their elements; directed graph
But we want generalisations - we are scientists!
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Induction of subsets:
– manual?
– automatic?
– machine learning over wikis?
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Cooperation with
– computational linguistics
Linguists are tree-huggers
●
Other dendrophiles
– Librarians – Biologists – ...
Linguists are tree-huggers
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Other dendrophiles
– Librarians – Biologists – ...
Linguists are tree-huggers
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Other dendrophiles
– Librarians – Biologists – ...
Linguists are tree-huggers
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Other dendrophiles
– Librarians – Botanists – ...
But the world is more complicated than that...
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Trees are rooted directed acyclic graphs
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Wikis are trees plus joins plus cycles
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But take a look at nested tables:
– not even formalisable within SGML/XML/ because
● SGML/XML is a tree language
● formalised as trees, tables require repetition of fan-out factor ● so their formal complexity is
– type 1
– context-sensitive – indexed
●
And there are many more complex structures than
PROSODY
A case study, or:
What kind of wiki would I need in order search
systematically for recent linguistic and phonetic
What do we do with prosody?
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Prosody is a function of
– pitch
– intensity – duration
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But that’s the
phonetician’s view
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There is also
– tone
– intonation – focus
– emphasis
– ...
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Rhythm has
– structural components – functional components
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So how do we cope with
all this (and more)?
– Just throw it into the wiki set?
– Structure it? – If so, how?
A traditional structure
But this is kinda silly if you think about
it for a while ...
pragmatics
semantics
syntax
morphology lexicon
phonology
Very different types...
Where is prosody?? Where are idioms??
A realistic semiotic interpretation
SIGN rank Interpretation Realisation
dialogue: turns, texts Communication
text: sentences Speech acts
sentence: Propositions word: morpheme: phoneme: syllables Internal structure External structure Social inter-action Discourse prosody, gesture Components of dialogues
Textual prosody, ges-ture
phrases, words
Parts of nar-rative, argu-mentative texts, etc. Phrasal prosody, rhythm stems, af-fixes Functional parts of sen-tences
Complex states, prop-erties, events, ...
Morphemes; word prosody: accent, tone phonemes,
syllables
Parts of words
Simple states, proper-ties, events, ...
Morphonemic pitch accent, tone
distinctive features
Encoding of morph-emes into sounds
Phonetic segments; al-lophones, allotones
A realistic semiotic interpretation
SIGN STRUCTURE
e.g. of word, document CONTENT e.g. sense RENDERING e.g. phonology, types REALISATION e.g. phonetics, tokens OBJECTS e.g. reference SEMANTIC INTERPRETATION MODALITY INTERPRETATION SEMIOTIC RELATION BETWEEN OBSERVABLES SEMIOTIC RELATION BETWEEN CATEGORIES EXTERNAL STRUCTURE INTERNAL STRUCTURE
Just phonetics: terms for a prosodic graph
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Time types
– absolute time – relative time – category time
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Aligned events
– streams – tracks – tiers
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Event
– property
– point / interval
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Names:
– transcription T: name of event property
– time-stamp TS: name of point / interval
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annotation: pair of
transcription and
time-stamp <T, TS>
Just phonetics: terms for a prosodic graph
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Relational formalisms:
– tuples: RDF
– even standard RDBMS:
● entity-relationship models ● Petri nets
– Graph formalisms (special case)
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Programming languages
– in the 1970s & 1980s, we used to use logical programming languages, especially Prolog, for
● representing relations, graphs, networks as
– fact theorems (database)
– rule theorems (knowledge base)
Oooff - all that structure ...
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Complexity of the field:
– Semantic networks? – Terminological
WordNet?
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Paradigmatic relations:
– taxonomy
● similarity ● difference
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Syntagmatic relations
– mereonomy/partonomy
● part - whole ● part - part
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So:
– The hubris approach: ● “intelligent design”
– The struggle for life approach:
● “evolution”
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Is there a healthy
compromise?
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Institutionalisation (Bird):
– cathedral? – bazaar?
... or Bazaar?
Don’t forget that we are searching for the truth...
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Correspondence
theories tempt one to
use the container
metaphor ...
●
Coherence theories
tempt one to trust the
wiki engines - well at
least they work ...
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Consensus theories
tempt one to adapt to the
ruling research funding
paradigms ...
Don’t forget: What are we searching for?
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Correspondence
theories encourage use
of the container
metaphor ...
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Coherence theories
encourage trusting the
wiki engines - well at
least they work ...
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Consensus theories
encourage adapting to
the ruling research
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Scientific wiki paradigm?
– transparency ● sustainability ● interoperability ● interpretability – open access
● open software
● open data
● open review, moderation
● open funding, curation ● ...
