On the Road to a Protest Event Ontology for B ulgarian: Conceptual Structures and Representation Design (2023)

Abstract: The paper presents a semantic model of protest events, called Semantic Interpretations of Protest Events (SemInPE). The analytical framework used for building the semantic representations is inspired by the object-oriented paradigm in computer science and a cognitive approach to the linguistic analysis. The model is a practical application of the Unified Eventity Representation (UER) formalism, which is based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML). The multi-layered architecture of the model provides flexible means for building the semantic representations of the language objects along a scale of generality and specificity. Thus, it is a suitable environment for creating the elements of ontologies on various topics and for different languages.

## introduction the paper presents a semantic model of events, which can be broadly defined as protest events. the model, which we call semantic interpretations of protest events (seminpe) is a practical application of the unified eventity representation (uer) -a cognitive theoretical approach and a graphical formalism @xcite based on the unified modeling language (uml) 1 -an international standard for graphical representation and design of objectoriented systems in the field of information technologies @xcite . the analytical framework used for building the semantic representations is inspired by the objectoriented paradigm in computer science and a cognitive approach to the linguistic analysis (schalley, 1 https://www.uml.org/ 2014). the application of this innovative formalism in our work is motivated by several merits of its, relevant to the task of building language-technologies-style ontologies utilisable in the social and political sciences. the analytical framework we apply is based on the four-layer metamodel (i.e., user objects, model, metamodel, and meta-metamodel) of the unified modeling language (uml). this multi-layered architecture provides flexible means for building the semantic representations of the language objects along a scale of generality and specificity. the inheritance mechanism of classes and objects provides a device for the definition of abstract, underlying semantic representations, which can be instantiated by specific descriptions corresponding to specific topics and specific languages. in our case, this particular conceptual modeling paves the way to building an ontology of protest events for bulgarian, but it is utilisable in multilingual settings as well. the structuring devices of the applied model provide the possibility for a modular and dynamically extensible knowledge representation, which is of particular importance for capturing the continuously varying information in the social and political domain. the cognitive approach to representing the linguistic units provides a conceptual modeling, which corresponds to the conceptualisation of the object-oriented modeling @xcite . in this way a direct use of the handy object-orientation devices is ensured in the semantic representation of language entities. we can also point out the presence of ontological knowledge (i.e., relation to real-world knowledge) in the semantic descriptions via the reference to ontological categories (see section 3). the paper is structured as follows. in section 2 we briefly refer to related work. in section 3 we present the model to be utilised in building an ontology in the domain of protest events. in section 4 the extraction of language data necessary for our work is discussed. section 5 provides concluding remarks and some hints on the future developments we envisage. ## related work as pointed out in the introduction, the work presented in this paper belongs to the analytical framework defined as object-oriented semantics. this relatively novel approach in linguistics so far has been demonstrated predominantly in the analysis of the meanings of verbs (e.g., @xcite , @xcite , @xcite . however, more recently, @xcite argue that the object-oriented approach is beneficial for the semantic representation of nominals as well, which is a useful development for large-scale conceptual modeling. the approach to the linguistic analysis in the work presented in this paper is a cognitive one. it is determined by principles relating perception, thinking and language. the basic assumption is that language reflects "patterns of thought", hence the study of language is connected to the exploration of "patterns of conceptualization" @xcite . this makes it possible to relate conceptual structures of language to the conceptual base of object-oriented programming languages. the graphical semantic formalism used in the application presented in this paper employs the unified modeling language (uml) @xcite , which contains notation techniques for combining structural (that is, static) and behavioural (that is, dynamic) modeling. a long-term research work for developing ontological foundations for conceptual modeling has used uml in building the framework of the unified foundational ontology (ufo) and especially in the development of ontouml -"ontologically well-founded conceptual modeling version of uml" @xcite . the work on the conceptually grounded semantic descriptors provokes a comparison with ontologies like, for instance, the suggested upper merged ontology (sumo) foot_0 @xcite , which has been mapped to wordnet @xcite . an open source knowledge engineering environment, sigma, has been created @xcite , which includes a full first order inference capability, as well as a natural language paraphrase capability for logical axioms. there are various taxonomies describing political events. the earliest event taxonomy for text analysis, which includes political events, is introduced in the context of the automatic content extraction program @xcite and the following tac initiative @xcite . other outstanding taxonomies in this domain include the intrusion detection extensible alert taxonomy idea @xcite , and the cameo taxonomy @xcite . several event data bases and systems such as @xcite use cameo. although cameo is sometimes referred to as ontology, the first fully fledged ontology in the domain of political events is plover @xcite , which includes protests and other political events as classes. an overview of the existing ontologies and taxonomies is presented in @xcite ; they also introduce their own ontology, called cofee. the ontologies and taxonomies mentioned so far refer to the large domain of political event detection. in contrast, very little work is dedicated specifically to protest events: danilova (2015) describes a model which includes arguments and classes similar to the ones we observed. relevant to our work is also the multilingual nexus event detection system, which uses linguistic rules, lexicon-based event classification, and an ad-hoc taxonomy of event classes to detect protests, riots, and other conflict events @xcite . protest events have also been studied by the political and social sciences. @xcite defines the protest as "an action through which individuals, groups, or organizations voice their objections, oppositions, demands, or grievances to a person or institution of authority". according to @xcite , the value of protest consists in making a difference; the successful protest being the one that effects change in line with the protesters' goals. event databases, such as polecat @xcite , the cameo dataset @xcite and others represent a bridge between the world of ontologies and political sciences. they introduce means for qualitative political studies, trend analysis and conflict prediction. ## the model as pointed out above, the semantic interpretations of protest events (seminpe) model we present here is based on the unified eventity representation (uer) theoretical approach and formalism @xcite . in the subsections that follow we present basic modeling elements and the way they will be used in the ontology construction. ## data the first step in preparing our semantic model was to acquire language objects that serve as instances of the various semantic classes contained in the model: as an additional data source we used the bulgarian section of google news foot_2 and downloaded 100 news articles from 2022 and 2023 related to protests, riots and strikes, and manually extracted from them additional relevant terms for each semantic class under consideration. it should be noted that all semantic classes were extracted from the aforementioned set of terms and the google news corpus. in this way we extracted the terms for the semantic class protest reasons (here the english translations of the bulgarian lexical items are given): "construction", "new law", "new order", "increased prices", "the president", "the opposition", "the conditions", "the mafia", "the ambassador", "the covid masks", "murder", "working conditions", "animal rights", etc. these are protest reasons, typical for the bulgarian society. similarly, we can deal with the other semantic classes in the model like conflict, occupation, religion, etc. ## conclusion we presented a semantic model, which contains flexible devices for representing the underlying conceptual structures of protest events. they include modeling elements defining classes of participants in the events, types of relationship among the participants, as well as the participants behaviour. the modeling framework of object-orientation proves to be a convenient tool for building information structures in language semantics, which can be adjusted to serve specific tasks and user demands. this assertion has been demonstrated by modeling elements of different degree of abstraction, which constitute a dynamic system of interrelated seman-