closelyRelatedNaturalLanguageTerm

[jhaag75]

While going through the exercise of updating the old profile vocab JSON, I noticed the closelyRelatedNaturalLanguageTerm was left out of the profile spec? I still see some value in providing this for verbs, activity types, etc. for machine understanding of terms that may have multiple meanings.

This property is used to connect the xAPI term to a specific sense, or meaning, in natural language that is very closely related with a wordnet definition. Wordnet aids in word sense disambiguation, and can be used with many different languages.

Is there a strong objection to leaving these in profiles? A lot of time was spent referencing wordnet for word sense disambiguation.

[fugu13]

It requires a fair bit of finicky expertise to get right (for example, it took multiple passes before just the ADL verbs linked to the proper places in Wordnet, since it's very easy to accidentally link to the wrong place in Wordnet), and doesn't add much definitional value since it will always be important to have a clear textual definition directly associated with the verb.

Connecting to other verbs as a sort of bootstrapping for relationships is potentially interesting, but also error fraught. Most of the use cases that we found are better served by being explicit about verb relationships using SKOS. Then all verb generalizations can be clearly reasoned about by humans and explained, as opposed to depending in part on, for example, which languages' wordnet files are loaded.

The one use case it makes sense to use Wordnet extensively in, search, doesn't require Wordnet be connected to the xAPI concepts. When someone does a textual search, that can be enriched with Wordnet directly before doing full text search across concepts.