Yetian Wang

Ph.D. Candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

University of Waterloo
200 University Ave W
Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1

Office: Artificial Intelligence Lab (DC 2306A)
Email: first.lastname AT uwaterloo DOT ca

Research Summary

My research interest is to look into a device of rhetoric called rhetorical figure in AI with a Knowledge Representation approach and to study the effect of rhetorical figures in requirements elicitaion.
The specifc rhetorical figure I'm investigating is called ploke (ploce, ploche, etc.) which is the name for rhetorical figures of lexical repetition. Yes, you are using rhetorical figures when you are repeating a word or phrase. Just that simple!
We get a different perception from a passage or utterance when a word or phrase is repeated. For example, "long long ago" feels further away in time than "long ago". These things are what current AI/NLP systems can't "feel" yet. What if we can take one small step towards that so that can "feel" the difference cognitively (just like us)? The first step is able to formally represent ploke. So they don't just "see" (detection) the repetitions but may also "know" (ontological representation), thus able to "feel" () the different attentional effects in future.

My work is supervised by Prof.Dan Berry and Prof.Grant Weddell from The Cheriton School of Computer Science and Prof. Randy Harris from The Department of English Language and Literature. I was introduced to this area by Prof. Chrysanne Di Marco who is now a Professor Emerita.

Research Interests

• Knowledge Representation
• Computational Rhetoric
• Requirements Elicitation
• Ontology Engineering
• The Semantic Web
• Smart Cities/Global City Indicators (Master's research)

Publications

• Wang, Y., Kühn, R., Harris, R., Mitrović, J. and Granitzer, M. (2022). Towards a Unified Multilingual Ontology for Rhetorical Figures. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management - Volume 2: KEOD, ISBN 978-989-758-614-9, ISSN 2184-3228, pages 117-127. DOI: 10.5220/0011524400003335
• Wang, Y., Harris, R.A., Berry, D.M. (2021). An Ontology for Ploke: Rhetorical Figures of Lexical Repetitions, JOWO 2021: Proceedings of the Joint Ontology Workshops 2021, 5th International Workshop on Cognition And OntologieS (CAOS) 2021
• Alliheedi, M., Wang, Y., Mercer, R.E. (2020). Design of a Biochemistry Procedure-Oriented Ontology. In: Fred, A., Salgado, A., Aveiro, D., Dietz, J., Bernardino, J., Filipe, J. (eds) Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management. IC3K 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1297. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66196-0_17
• Alliheedi, M., Wang, Y., Mercer, R. (2019). Biochemistry Procedure-oriented Ontology: A Case Study.In Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management - Volume 2: KEOD, ISBN 978-989-758-382-7, pages 164-173.
• Black, L. A., Tu, K., O’Reilly, C., Wang, Y., Pacheco, P. and Harris, R. A. (2019). An Ontological Approach to Meaning Making through PATH and Gestalt Foregrounding in Climax . The American Journal of Semiotics, 35(1/2), 217-249.
• O’Reilly, C., Wang, Y., Tu, K., Bott, S., Pacheco, P., Black, T. W. and Harris, R. A. (2018, April). Arguments in Gradatio, Incrementum and Climax; a Climax Ontology. In 18th workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument (CMNA).
• Wang, Y., Friyia, D., Liu, K., Cohen, R. (2018). An Architecture for an AI Military System with Ethical Rules. AAAI 2018 Spring Symposium on AI and Society: Ethics, Safety and Trustworthiness in Intelligent Agents
• Wang, Y., Fox, M.S. (2017). Consistency Analysis of City Indicator Data . In: Geertman S., Allan A., Pettit C., Stillwell J. (eds) Planning Support Science for Smarter Urban Futures. CUPUM 2017. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography. Springer, Cham, pp 355-369
• Wang, Y., Fox, M.S. (2016). Households, The Homeless and Slums Towards a Standard for Representing City Shelter Open Data . Workshops at the Thirty-First AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence: AI and OR for Social Good.

Other Stuff

Award

DiMarco Graduate Scholarship in Computational Rhetoric

Tutorials

A Protege Tutorial for ENGL 795 (Fall 2018)

Links

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Research Gate
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