An explainable Link Discovery: Multilingual Link Specification verbalization and summarization

Abstract The number and size of datasets abiding by the Linked Data paradigm increase every day. Discovering links between these datasets is thus central to achieving the vision behind the Data Web. Declarative Link Discovery (LD) frameworks rely on complex Link Specification (LS) to express the conditions under which two resources should be linked. Understanding such LS is not a trivial task for non-expert users. Particularly when such users are interested in generating LS to match their needs. Even if the user applies a machine learning algorithm for the automatic generation of the required LS, the challenge of explaining the resultant LS persists. Hence, providing explainable LS is the key challenge to enable users who are unfamiliar with underlying LS technologies to use them effectively and efficiently. In this paper, we extend our previous work (Ahmed et al., 2019) by proposing a generic multilingual approach that allows verbalization of LS in many languages, i.e., converts LS into understandable natural language text. In this work, we ported our LS verbalization framework into German and Spanish, in addition to English language. Our adequacy and fluency evaluations show that our approach can generate complete and easily understandable natural language descriptions even by lay users. Moreover, we devised an experimental neural approach for improving the quality of our generated texts. Our neural approach achieves promising results in terms of BLEU, METEOR and chrF++.