KnowledgE ENgineering Team

KnowledgE ENgineering team

Funded projects - Recent highlights - Members and collaborators
The aim of the team's activities is to contribute computing theory, methods, and techniques to the knowledge society.
The scope of the KEEN team is knowledge engineering in its broad sense. This includes ontology engineering, the Semantic Web, intelligent (logic-based, ontology-driven) conceptual modelling, and natural language generation.

Funded research projects

GeNi: A Grammar Engine for Nguni natural language Interfaces. Funded by the NRF (2015-2017).
Foundations for Nguni natural language generation systems. UCT Science Faculty Launching grant (2014-2017).
ARISTOTELES: Methodology and algorithms for automatic revision of ontologies in task based scenarios. Funded by the Polish National Science Center (2015-2018) and spearheaded by Agnieszka Lawrynowicz.
Other funding from: HPI Research School in Computer Science for Africa (CS4A) at UCT, NRF incentive funding, ULPDO@UKZN.

Recent highlights

Two ESWC'17 demos: one on the isiZulu verbaliser of OWL ontologies, by Musa Xakaza, Langa Khumalo, and Maria Keet, and one on test-driven development of ontologies with TDDonto2, by Kieren Davies, Agnieszka Lawrynowicz, and Maria Keet.
ESWC'17 paper: patterns for heterogenenous alignments between different modelling decisions (Fillottrani and Keet).
Joan Byamugisha wins postgrad award of CS@UCT; the prize is awarded yearly to the postgraduate student with the most distinguished scientific contribution.
Joan Byamugisha wins CNL 2016 Best Student Paper Award: the paper describes the outcomes of bootstrapping a Runyankore CNL from an isiZulu CNL.
IsiZulu spellchecker: after having laid the theoretical foundations (Ndaba, Suleman, Keet, Khumalo), the end-user usable version will be launched on 10 Nov 2016 at UKZN (Pilusa, Keet, Suleman).

For a full list of papers and related outputs, click here.

Members and collaborators

Leader
Maria Keet

Postgraduate students

Joan Byamugisha (PhD, 2015-); topic: Runyankore knowledge-to-text NLG for healthcare
Zubeida Khan (PhD; 2014-); topic: ontology modularity
Yamiko Msosa (PhD; 2014-); topic: clinincal practice guideline changes
Zola Mahlaza (MSc; 2016-); topic: data-to-text NLG for weather bulletins in isiXhosa and isiZulu
Jarvis Mutakha (MSc, supervisor; 2017-); topic: Applications of isiZulu CNLs
Cameron Kyle (M. IT, supervisor; 2017-); topic: CNLs for finance
Iman Neguib (M. IT, supervisor; 2017-); topic: temporal conceptual models and databases

BSc(honours) students

Nthabiseng Mashiane, Frida Mjaria, and Siseko Neti, on Spellcheckers for isiZulu and isiXhosa (2017)
Soham Singh, Nikhil Gilbert, and Kgotso Nkosi, on Automated marking of language learning exercises (2017)

Scientific programmers

Musa Xakaza (2016); linking the verbaliser to Owlready
Takunda Chirema (2016); a tool for modelling with relations and roles
Norman Pilusa (2016); isiZulu spellchecker

Collaborators

Digital Libraries Lab, UCT (Hussein Suleman)
Poznan University of Technology, Poland - Laboratory of Operational Research and Artificial Intelligence (Agnieszka Lawrynowicz)
Universidad Nacional del Sur, Bahia Blanca, Argentina - Depto. Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación (Pablo Fillottrani)
University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa - Linguistics program and University Language Planning and Development Office (Langa Khumalo)

Alumni

Ameerah Allie (2016; BSc honous); topic: Test-driven development of ontologies
Kieren Davies (2016; BSc honours in CS); topic: Test-driven development of ontologies

The KEEN team