KnowledgE ENgineering team
Funded projects - Recent highlights - Members and collaboratorsThe 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
- MoRe NL: foundations of a Modular Realisation Engine for Nguni Languages, funded by the NRF (2020-2022)
- Erasmus+ funding with Poznan University of Technology (2020-2022)
- Various funding sources over the past years; mainly: NRF, HPI Research School in Computer Science for Africa (CS4A) at UCT, DOT4D@UCT, ULPDO@UKZN.
- Recently completed projects:
- Quest: Querying Smart Text, supposedly funded by SADiLaR but not paid out still. (2019-2020)
- Teaching material development grant for the "An introduction to Ontology Engineering" textbook, funded by the Digital Open Textbooks for Development project at UCT. Project duration: 2019-2020 (1 year).
- ARISTOTELES: Methodology and algorithms for automatic revision of ontologies in task based scenarios. Funded by the Polish National Science Center (2015-2018) with PI Agnieszka Lawrynowicz.
- Medical Machine Translation, in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh, UK. Funded by the EPSRC, UK (2017-2018).
- 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).
Recent highlights
- Book chapter emanating from a section of Zubeida Khan's PhD thesis, on abstraction mechanisms for ontology modularisation, with Maria Keet.
- IJMSO journal article on grammar and template-mediated techniques for verbalising ontologies and similar artefacts, with as main author Zola Mahlaza. This is an extended version of our MTSR'19 paper.
- WebNLG'20 paper on OWLSIZ, an isiZulu CNL for validating structured knowledge by means of answering questions generated from an ontology, with as main author KEEN PhD student Zola Mahlaza.
- KnowID architecture for Knowledge-driven Information and Data access: two journal articles (in Data Intelligence and Künstliche Intelligenz), with Maria Keet and collaborators Pablo Fillottrani and Stephan Jamieson. see the KnowID page for details.
- Two papers accepted at FOIS 2020, on commitments in ontology language design by Maria Keet with collaborator Pablo Fillottrani, and on why a computer program is a functional whole.
- Conference organisation of the IJCAI 2021 Demonstrations track, the 22nd International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW 2020), ACM SIGIR/SIGKDD Africa Summer School on Machine Learning for Data Mining and Search (AFIRIM 2020), ISWC 2019 Outrageous Ideas Track, and others.
Members and collaborators
LeaderMaria Keet
Postgraduate students
- Mary-Jane Antia (PhD; 2019-); area: ontology engineering, competency questions
- Frances Gillis-Webber (PhD; 2019-); area: multilingual ontologies
- Toky Raboanary (PhD; 2019-); area: ontology engineering
- Zola Mahlaza (PhD; 2018-); topic: isiXhosa and isiZulu NLG
- Leighton Dawson (MSc, 2020-); topic: ODPs
- Jacques de Lange (M. IT; 2021-); topic: NLP with SA English
- Kyle Seakgwa (M. IT; 2021-); topic: artificial moral agents
- TBA for 2021
- TBA for 2021
- Universidad Nacional del Sur, Bahia Blanca, Argentina - Depto. Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación (Pablo Fillottrani)
- Poznan University of Technology, Poland - Laboratory of Operational Research and Artificial Intelligence (Agnieszka Lawrynowicz)
- University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa - Linguistics program and University Language Planning and Development Office (Langa Khumalo)
- University of Waterloo, Canada - Computer Science department (David Toman)
- Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), South Africa (Zubeida Khan)
- Digital Libraries Lab, UCT (Hussein Suleman)
- School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, UK, (Kenneth Heafield, Alexandra Birch)
- Joan Byamugisha (PhD; 2015-2019); topic: Runyankore knowledge-to-text NLG for healthcare
- Yamiko Msosa (PhD; 2014-2018); topic: semantics-driven linincal practice guideline changes
- Zubeida Khan (PhD; 2014-2017); topic: ontology modularity
- Zola Mahlaza (MSc; 2016-2017); topic: data-to-text NLG for weather bulletins in isiXhosa and isiZulu
- Cameron Kyle (M. IT; 2017); topic: CNLs for finance
- Kouthar Dollie (2020; BSc honours): Social Dance App -- MetaDance
- Carryn Joseph (2020; BSc honours): Social Dance App -- Dancebase
- Alec Badenhorst (2020; BSc honours): CASEText: A computational analysis of SA English
- Umar Khan (2020; BSc honours): CASEText: corpora for SA English
- Mandisa Baleni (2020; BSc honours): KnowDat: Materialisation of deductions (as part of KnowID)
- Bradley Malgas (2020; BSc honours): KnowDat: ggraphical query interface (as part of KnowID)
- Alka Baijnath (2019; BSc honous): Salsational Dance Application
- Jordy Chetty (2019; BSc honous): Salsational Dance Application
- Micara Marajh (2019; BSc honous): Salsational Dance Application
- Kyle Robbertze (2019; BSc honous): ontology-annotated smart textbooks
- Steve Wang (2019; BSc honous): ontology-based question generation
- Jarryd Dunn (2019; BSc honous): comparing end-to-end models and templates for Generating text (main supervisor: Zola Mahlaza)
- Matthew Poulter (2019; BSc honous): comparing end-to-end models and templates for Generating text (main supervisor: Zola Mahlaza)
- Nthabiseng Mashiane (2017; BSc honous); topic: spelling error detection for isiXhosa
- Frida Mjaria (2017; BSc honous); topic: spelling error correction for isiZulu
- Siseko Neti (2017; BSc honous); topic: spelling error detection for isiXhosa
- Nikhil Gilbert (2017; BSc honous); topic: Automated marker for language learning exercises
- Soham Singh (2017; BSc honous); topic: difficulty levels with the automated marker for langauge learning
- Kgotso Nkosi (2017; BSc honous)
- Ameerah Allie (2016; BSc honous); topic: Test-driven development of ontologies
- Kieren Davies (2016; BSc honours); topic: Toward Test-driven development of ontologies
- Kouthar Dollie (2020; research assistant): MorReNL project
- Blessed Chitamba (2020; scientific programmer): MorReNL project
- Gerald Ngumbulu (2020; scientific programmer): MorReNL project
- Zola Mahlaza (2019; RA): OE tutorial
- Frances Gillis-Webber (2019; RA): OE tutorial
- Michael Harrison (2019; scientific programmer): OE tools
- Toky Raboanary (2019; scientific programmer): OE tools
- Stephan Jamieson (2019; scientific programmer): KnowID
- Zola Mahlaza (2017; scientific programmer); on the isiZulu verb grammar and medical machine translation
- Siseko Neti (2017; scientific programmer); isiZulu grammar and spellchecker
- Norman Pilusa (2016, 2017; scientific programmer); isiZulu spellchecker
- Takunda Chirema (2016; scientific programmer); a tool for modelling with relations and roles
- Musa Xakaza (2016; scientific programmer); linking the verbaliser to Owlready