Text Encoding Initiative Tenth Anniversary User Conference

1. Introduction

Beyond the need to query and retrieve based on tags which exist in a TEI document, a means to manipulate and query classes of objects is also desirable. The TEI DTD uses SGML entity definitions to create "classes" of elements and attributes, in particular, for groups of elements with common structural properties (e.g., all elements that can appear between paragraphs), groups of attributes which apply to certain classes of elements (e.g., attributes for pointer elements), etc. In addition to grouping together elements and attributes with common structural properties, the definition of such classes recognizes common semantic properties among elements and attributes. However, the SGML entity definition mechanism provides only for string substitution within the DTD itself, thereby enabling easy reference to these classes in later element definitions; the common semantic properties that are implicit in the classification scheme are lost for the purposes of retrieval and document manipulation. Obviously, a means to refer to and manipulate classes of elements and attributes in a query and retrieval system would provide substantial additional power for the user.

We are experimenting with the representation of a DTD and associated documents (i.e., documents conformant to the DTD) in a knowledge representation (KR) system, in order to provide more sophisticated query and retrieval from TEI documents than current systems provide. We are using CLASSIC, a frame-based representation system developed at AT&T Bell Laboratories [2]. Like many KR systems, CLASSIC enables the definition of structured concepts/frames, their organization into taxonomies, the creation and manipulation of individual instances of such concepts, and inference such as inheritance, relation transitivity, inverses, etc. In addition, CLASSIC provides for the key inferences of subsumption and classification [4]. By representing a document as an individual instance of a hierarchy of concepts derived from the DTD, and by allowing the creation of additional user-defined concepts and relations, sophisticated query and retrieval operations can be performed. This paper briefly describes the CLASSIC system, the representation of a DTD and a document conforming to that DTD in CLASSIC, and provides an overview of the kind of query and retrieval that can be performed.

2. The CLASSIC Knowledge Representation System

Historically, CLASSIC is a descendant of KL-ONE, and is in the family of languages known as description logics. Such languages attempt to deal with terminological reasoning and automatic classification [5].

There are three kinds of formal objects in CLASSIC:

• concepts Concepts are descriptions of classes of objects. In general, a concept description includes only the sufficient properties of that class, and this enables subsumption reasoning. For example, if we define AUTHOR as a concept which is both a kind of a PERSON and has written something, then any instance of PERSON which has written something is automatically classified as an AUTHOR.
• individuals Individuals are instances of concepts. This is typically the data in a knowledge-base. For example, PERSON is a concept, and CHRIS may be an individual of PERSON.
• roles A role is a relationship between individuals, and is also used to store simple attributes of individuals. For example, the individual CHRIS may have a role called NAME, which is filled with the string "Chris"--a simple attribute. If the individual CHRIS has a role called EMPLOYEE-OF, which is filled with the individual VASSAR (an individual of the concept COLLEGE), then EMPLOYEE-OF is considered a relationship between the two individuals CHRIS and VASSAR.

CLASSIC provides for the following kinds of inference:

• inheritance When an individual is asserted to be an instance of a certain concept, the individual is assumed to be described by that concept, and therefore it inherits all the properties described in the concept and all the properties defined in the parents of that concept. This is a fairly standard mechanism provided by most KR and object-oriented languages.
• propagation /transitivity CLASSIC provides for specifying rules that can be used to add more relationships to individuals. For example, we can define a rule that says if A is PART-OF B and B is PART-OF C, then A is PART-OF C.
• inverses Roles can be defined as inverses of each other. For example, if we define the role HAS-PART to be the inverse of the role PART-OF, then if we say A is PART-OF B, then we automatically infer that B HAS-PART A. In the example above, this would be combined with the transitivity of PART-OF to give us C HAS-PART B and C HAS-PART A.
• role hierarchies Roles can be defined to have parents, which are more general roles. When an individual has a value for a role which has a parent, the individual is inferred to have the same value for the parent role. For example, if we define that the role ENGINE-OF has a parent role PART-OF, and we say that individual A has the value B for its ENGINE-OF role (i.e. A ENGINE-OF B), then we infer A PART-OF B.
• classification/subsumption CLASSIC can automatically determine membership of an individual in a certain class even when not specified. This is an immensely powerful tool. For example, let us define the concept FACULTY as follows: (and PERSON (all employee-of COLLEGE)). This means that the concept FACULTY is a subconcept (subclass) of PERSON, and that the EMPLOYEE-OF role is filled with an individual of the concept COLLEGE. Let us say that we next create an individual of PERSON, CHRIS, with a simple value in its NAME role, the string "Chris". In CLASSIC , this would be specified as (and PERSON (fills NAME "Chris")). Next we create an individual of the concept COLLEGE called VASSAR. At some later time, we add information to the individual CHRIS, indicating that the value for the EMPLOYEE-OF role is VASSAR. CLASSIC will automatically infer that CHRIS is now an individual of (is subsumed by) the concept FACULTY.

3. DTDs in CLASSIC

The roles in the derived ontology are not meant to capture the complete syntactic meaning of the DTD. The contains role, for example, simply indicates that one element can be structurally contained in another. The first and next roles are used to represent the order. For example, the element definition:

            <!ELEMENT  keywords      - -  (term+ | list)  >

     keywords :: (and dtd-element
                 (all contains (or term list))
                 (all first (or term list)))

     term     :: (and dtd-element
                 (all next term))

       <!ATTLIST div  %a.text; 
                         complete       (y | n)  >

       div :: (all complete string)

Note that our system does not do error checking on documents; there are many tools to test DTD conformancy, so it is not necessary to capture these restrictions.

4. User-defined classes

Once defined as members of a class, groups of elements can be queried, manipulated, etc. as a group, rather than as a list of individuals. In addition, properties can be associated with any class which are then automatically "inherited" by all members of that class; for example, if the class name is defined as having sub-parts FIRSTNAME and LASTNAME, then all members of the class person-name are defined to have those sub-parts. Queries can also exploit inherited properties.

The type attribute is treated specially when generating an ontology from a DTD. In the CES DTD, the type attribute is used consistently to denote subtypes. For example, the element name has a type attribute which has values such as PERSON, ORGANIZATION, etc. Some elements in the DTD specify a closed list of values for the TYPE attribute (the measure element in the CES DTD defines the possible values of type to be one of weight, length, count, area, volume, temperature, currency), but most do not. If a range of values is specified, each of these becomes a subconcept of the concept representing the element. If not, the user may create subconcepts manually, or may wait for these subconcepts to be created automatically when documents are processed (see below).

Roles may also be associated with any CLASSIC concept, enabling the creation of more complex relations. For example, a concept person can be established with a role name; this role can be filled by any individual object (element) which is a person-name, such as NAME, AUTHOR, etc. Another role, affiliation, could also be associated with person and filled by an individual of an appropriate concept/element such as organization.

It is important to note that we are here defining semantic relationships, as opposed to the syntactic relationships defined by the DTD. For example, in a marked-up document in which a P element occurs within a BODY element, it is tempting to refer to the BODY element as a parent of the P element, since this is true for the parse tree representing the document. However, here we refer to this kind of structural relationship using the contains role, and we would therefore say the BODY element contains the P element.

In our terminology, one element is the parent of another only when it is more general--analogous to a superclass in an object-oriented language. However, there is no way to express this kind of parent relationship in SGML. The CES DTD and the TEI DTD both attempt to use entities to create "classes" of elements and attributes, but because entities are only a string-replacement mechanism, there is no means by which class membership can be recognized or manipulated by typical SGML-aware software. The ability to manipulate and query on the basis of class membership is one of the most important and promising aspects of the CLASSIC representation for SGML documents.

5. Documents in CLASSIC

     <HTML>
     <TITLE>Example</TITLE>
     <BODY><P>This is a simple example.</P></BODY>
     </HTML>

     HTML-1  :: (and HTML
                      (fills contains TITLE-2 BODY-3)
                      (fills first TITLE-2))

     TITLE-2 ::  (and TITLE
                     (fills contains CDATA-4)
                     (fills first CDATA-4)
                     (fills next BODY-3))

     BODY-3  ::  (and BODY
                     (fills contains P-5)
                     (fills first P-5))

     P-5     :: (and P
                     (fills contains CDATA-6)
                     (fills first CDATA-6))

     CDATA-4 :: (and CDATA
                    (fills text "Example"))

     CDATA-6 :: (and CDATA
                    (fills text "This is a simple example."))

6. Using CLASSIC to Query Documents

The main difference between a KR system like CLASSIC and a relational database is the ability to specify inferences that eliminate the need for a user to be completely familiar with the DTD. That is, knowledge of what the structural relationships in the document actually mean can be specified in the ontology and used to make the job of searching for information easier for the user.

For example, a marked-up document conforming to the CES DTD might contain a NAME element, with type=PERSON, within the BODY part of a document. When this element is encountered, our system will read the type attribute and, if this is the first time that type has been encountered, it will create a new concept with NAME as its parent, and then create an individual of that new concept that represents the tagged text.

Now suppose we decide that "any person-name occuring within the BODY of a document is a character." We create a new role called character, which is attached only to documents, and we can specify that the character role of a document is filled automatically with values according to the rule "any person-name occuring within the BODY of a document is a character" (the syntax for specifying such a rule is beyond the scope of this article). Subsequently, retrieval can be performed on the basis of this defined relationship; for example, all characters can be retrieved, or all characters with a certain set of characteristics, etc.--even if there is no tag for character. Note also that such queries would differentiate names applying to persons vs. names applying to places, organizations, etc., as well as names appearing in the body and names appearing elsewhere (for example, in the header). This overcomes a problem that arises due to the lack of scoping rules in SGML: for example, the element NAME may have a very different semantics depending on whether it appears in the header or in the body of the text, but SGML provides no way to differentiate instances of a given tag on the basis of context. [6]

The representation of DTDs and associated documents in CLASSIC provides considerable facility for document query. Details are excluded due to space restrictions, but consider in particular the following capabilities:

• selection of or reference to particular portions of a document, enabling queries which, for example, access information in the header only, in titles only, in running prose only, etc.;
• reference to classes rather than specific instances of a class, enabling, for example, queries on anything which is a person-name, regardless of whether the actual tag is PERSNAME, AUTHOR, etc. This is particularly powerful because it avoids complex queries involving boolean expressions (e.g., "persname OR author OR (name WITH-ATT 'person') IN body", etc.), and the user is not required to be familiar with the DTD in order to formulate a query;
• access to information not explicitly available from the structure of the document, but which is inferred by CLASSIC. For example, a person is a class of individuals that exist separate from the DTD-based ontology. When a person's name is read in as an author of a document, we can infer that person is an author.

• all authors where the last name is "Smith"
• all persons where the last name is "Smith"
• all technical articles written by persons with affiliation "Vassar"
• all technical articles written by authors with last name "Smith" and affiliation "Vassar"
• all authors of technical articles
• all articles containing a mention of a person with name "Smith" (either as an author or mentioned in the article, etc.)
• all persons in the header
• all persons with no affiliation
• all dates that appear within paragraph-like elements only (i.e., not in the header, headings, titles, etc.)

7. Conclusion

The representation of SGML documents in CLASSIC may also have repercussions for DTD design. So far, DTD design has been largely unprincipled, and wide variations in the kinds of information represented by elements, attributes, and tag content often occur, even within the same DTD. However, the formal representation of elements, attributes, and content as CLASSIC objects demands consistency in their use within the DTD. The development of a set of principles for DTD design is a desideratum among the encoding community; we are looking into the ways in which formatlization of DTDs in CLASSIC can contribute to this development.

At the same time, the use of a system such as CLASSIC allows for greater flexibility in tagging text. For example, for names of people, the encoder can use the general NAME tag--or even more generally, RS (referring string)--or provide a very precise encoding using PERSNAME with FIRSTNAME, LASTNAME, etc. elements inside. Once represented in CLASSIC, these objects can be both recognized as members of the class person-name and accessed and manipulated as such. This frees the encoder to choose an encoding for each name that is appropriate; there is no need for absolute consistency to enable the semantic identity of the two elements to be recognized. More generally, it allows precise tag semantics to be instantiated in a system external to the encoded text.

Acknowledgements

References

[2] Brachman, R, Borgida, A., McGuinness, D., and Resnick, L. The CLASSIC Knowledge Representation System. In Proceedings of the 11th IJCAI. August, 1989.

[3] Ide, N., Priest-Dorman, G., Véronis, J. (1996). Corpus Encoding Standard. Documentation and DTDs available at http://www.cs.vassar.edu/CES/.

[4] Brachman, R. What is-a is and isn't. IEEE Computer. October, 1983. pp 30-36.

[5] Minsky, M. A Framework for Representing Knowledge. Mind Design. MIT Press. Pp. 95-128. 1981.

[6] The CES attempts to solve this problem by renaming elements such as NAME, TITLE, AUTHOR, etc. when they appear in the header (e.g., H.NAME, H.TITLE, etc.). However, this solution is clearly ad hocand only complicates the information the use is required to remember if retrieval is based solely on the specifications in the DTD.

[6] Welty, Chris. Intelligent Assistance for Navigating the Web. Proceedings of The 1996 Florida AI Research Symposium. May, 1996.

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