Zola Mahlaza

University of Cape Town | UCT · Department of Computer Science

Text generation models, the core technology that underpins chatbots such as ChatGPT, that are created to support morphologically complex African languages require the modelling of sub-word processes such as phonological conditioning. Since we rely on explicit phonological conditioning rules that are manually identified by grammarians to determine t...

Foundational ontologies can be used to enable semantic interoperability in modern information systems. Aligning a domain ontology to a foundational ontology is perceived difficult, however. Reasons include confusing underlying concepts, understanding the philosophical ideologies of foundational ontologies, and lack of alignment guidance. For BFO, t...

High school learners in low-income countries are negatively impacted by the SARS Covid-19 pandemic. Consequently, university lecturers of mathematics will have to offer remedial classes to bridge the gap. Since they cannot create practice problems at scale for each student’s needs, there is a need for computational tools to do so. There are no exis...

There has been growing interest in building surface realisation systems to support the automatic generation of text in African languages. Such tools focus on converting abstract representations of meaning to a text. Since African languages are low-resourced, economical use of resources and general maintainability are key considerations. However, th...

Typical user-friendly renderings of knowledge graphs are visualisations and natural language text. Within the latter HCI solution approach, data-driven natural language generation systems receive increased attention, but they are often outperformed by template-based systems due to suffering from errors such as content dropping, hallucination, or re...

There are limited computational resources for Nguni languages and when improving availability for one of the languages, bootstrapping from a related language’s resources may be a cost-saving approach. This requires the ability to quantify similarity between any two closely related languages so as to make informed decisions, of which it is unclear h...

Involving domain-experts in the development, maintenance, and use of knowledge organisation systems can be made easier through the introduction of easy-to-use interfaces that are based on natural language. Well resourced languages make use of natural language generation techniques to provide such interfaces. In particular, they often make use of te...

Competency Questions (CQs) assist in the development and maintenance of ontologies and similar knowledge organisation systems. The absence of tools to support the authoring of CQs has hampered their effective use. The few existing question templates have limited coverage of sentence constructions and are restricted to OWL. We aim to address this by...

Competency Questions (CQs) for an ontology and similar artefacts aim to provide insights into the contents of an ontology and to demarcate its scope. The absence of a controlled natural language, tooling and automation to support the authoring of CQs has hampered their effective use in ontology development and evaluation. The few question templates...

Natural Language Processing (NLP) for underresourced languages may benefit from a bootstrapping approach to utilise the sparse resources across closely related languages. This brings afore the question of language similarity, and therewith the question of how to measure that, so as to make informed predictions on potential success of bootstrapping....