Semantic parameterization is a conceptual modeling process for expressing natural language descriptions of a domain in first-order predicate logic.T.D. Breaux, A.I. Anton, J. Doyle
"Semantic parameterization: a process for modeling domain descriptions"
, ''ACM Transactions on Software Engineering Methodology'', vol. 18, no. 2, Article 5, 2008. The process yields a formalization of natural language sentences in Description Logic to answer the ''who,'' ''what'' and ''where'' questions in the Inquiry-Cycle Model (ICM) developed by Colin Potts and his colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology.C. Potts, K. Takahashi, and A.I. Anton, "Inquiry-based requirements analysis", ''IEEE Software'' 11(2): 21–32, 1994. The parameterization process complements the Knowledge Acquisition and autOmated Specification (KAOS) method, which formalizes answers to the ''when'', ''why'' and ''how'' ICM questions in

Temporal Logic In logic, temporal logic is any system of rules and symbolism for representing, and reasoning about, propositions qualified in terms of time (for example, "I am ''always'' hungry", "I will ''eventually'' be hungry", or "I will be hungry ''until'' I ...

, to complete the ICM formalization. The artifacts used in the parameterization process include a dictionary that aligns the domain lexicon with unique concepts, distinguishing between

synonyms A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. For example, in the English language, the words ''begin'', ''start'', ''commence'', and ''initiate'' are ...

and

polysemes Polysemy ( or ; ) is the capacity for a sign (e.g. a symbol, a morpheme, a word, or a phrase) to have multiple related meanings. For example, a word can have several word senses. Polysemy is distinct from ''monosemy'', where a word has a single ...

, and several natural language patterns that aid in mapping common domain descriptions to formal specifications.

Relationship to other theories

Semantic Parameterization defines a meta-model consisting of eight roles that are domain-independent and reusable. Seven of these roles correspond to Jeffrey Gruber's

thematic relations In certain theories of linguistics, thematic relations, also known as semantic roles, are the various roles that a noun phrase may play with respect to the action or state described by a governing verb, commonly the sentence's main verb. For exam ...

and

case role Case roles, according to the work by Fillmore (1967), are the semantic roles of noun phrases in relation to the syntactic structures that contain these noun phrases. The term case role is most widely used for purely semantic relations, including th ...

s in Charles Fillmore's case grammar:C. Fillmore, "The Case for Case", ''Universals in Linguistic Theory'', Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, New York, 1968. The Inquiry-Cycle Model (ICM) was introduced to drive elicitation between engineers and stakeholders in requirements engineering. The ICM consists of ''who'', ''what'', ''where'', ''why'', ''how'' and ''when'' questions. All but the ''when'' questions, which require a

to represent such phenomena, have been aligned with the meta-model in semantic parameterization using Description Logic (DL).

Introduction with Example

The semantic parameterization process is based on Description Logic, wherein the TBox is composed of words in a ''dictionary'', including nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and the ABox is partitioned into two sets of assertions: 1) those assertions that come from words in the natural language statement, called the ''grounding'', and 2) those assertions that are inferred by the (human) modeler, called the ''meta-model''. Consider the following unstructured natural language statement (UNLS) (see Breaux et al. for an extended discussion): ;UNLS_1.0: The customer_1,1 must not share_2,2 the access-code_3,3 of the customer_1,1 with someone_4,4 who is not the provider_5,4. The modeler first identifies intensional and extensional polysemes and synonyms, denoted by the subscripts: the first subscript uniquely refers to the intensional index, i.e., the same first index in two or more words refer to the same concept in the TBox; the second subscript uniquely refers to the extensional index, i.e., two same second index in two or more words refer to the same individual in the ABox. This indexing step aligns words in the statement and concepts in the dictionary. Next, the modeler identifies concepts from the dictionary to compose the meta-model. The following table illustrates the complete DL expression that results from applying semantic parameterization.

References

{{Reflist Knowledge representation