Trying to make Sense of the new Bible Sense Search

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/738086#Comment_738086

This is a shortcoming of the BSL. There is inconsistency in tagging. Two or more words may have the same sense, but the BSL assigns two or more different tags. To do an effective search one has to know all of the different senses that mean the same thing.

For example if one wanted to know where all the prayers were in a book or passage. For verbs there are the following senses:

To pray

To Pray (Petition)

To Pray (Beg)

For nouns:

Prayer (Act)

Prayer (Petition)

Prayer (Text)

Prayer (Contents)

Prayer vow

Clearly a search for only one of these senses will not render complete results. It seems to me the tagging needs to be simplified and consistent. I don't care if a prayer is considered an act or petition when I am searching for prayers. I don't care whether someone is begging or simply praying when I am searching for prayers.

Doc B

Clearly a search for only one of these senses will not render complete results. It seems to me the tagging needs to be simplified and consistent.

[y][y][y]

I wasn't aware of this limitation. I'm glad you explained it...it helps me understand why I wasn't getting expected results at times (I had assumed it was my own inability to use the software correctly...which may still be partly true, but isn't the primary cause).

I can see why the separate tags might be handy (searching for prayers that are petitions, for example). But I also see bigger need, as you point out, to have a simple way to search for the sense 'to pray' (for example).

LimJK

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/738086#Comment_738086

Clearly a search for only one of these senses will not render complete results. It seems to me the tagging needs to be simplified and consistent. I don't care if a prayer is considered an act or petition when I am searching for prayers. I don't care whether someone is begging or simply praying when I am searching for prayers.

Fred,

I think it is nice to have we can have some kind of a structure like LN so that we are able to search for all <Sense = Pray> to catch all as well as the options to look at the sub-sense <Sense = Pray (Beg)>

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/738228#Comment_738228

I think it is nice to have we can have some kind of a structure like LN so that we are able to search for all <Sense = Pray> to catch all as well as the options to look at the sub-sense <Sense = Pray (Beg)>

The problem is it doesn't seem to work that way - in this case - they seem to be in different parts of the tree

"To Pray" is part of "communicate / commune"

while praying as begging is part of asking / petitioning

So they are speaking about different things but it isn't clear - at least to me - how you can get a complete picture of what we might generally think of as praying.

Taking a couple of these examples:

<Sense God ⇔ father>

It seems that in the NT, God is simply tagged as "God" - even when a Father "sense" might be appropriate

<Sense = faithfulness>

Faithfulness is described as "the quality of being faithful" and - as you point out - is only tagged in the OT

I would have expected the same tag to be used in Romans 3:3 but "trustworthiness" is used instead

According to the BSL this is a perceived trait based on past behaviour

This may be very reasonable but, as you point out in your original note, it does make it difficult to find unifying themes.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/738233#Comment_738233

That is precisely the purpose of the Sense Lexicon - to tease out distinctions between words that are blurred in sloppy human thought. The sense lexicon tries to makes meaning sufficiently unambiguous as to be usable by a machine or to assist a human to break associations from one language from bleeding into another.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/738237#Comment_738237

The sense lexicon tries to makes meaning sufficiently unambiguous as to be usable by a machine or to assist a human to break associations from one language from bleeding into another.

I agree with this - but don't understand why this means that God isn't tagged as "Father" when it would seem appropriate in the NT.

Thoughts?

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/738238#Comment_738238

I don't know the thinking of Logos on this but if I were to try to defend it, I would wonder if they considered it anachronistic to tag it as "Father" given the span of time over which the understanding of the Trinity developed.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/738241#Comment_738241

I don't know the thinking of Logos on this but if I were to try to defend it, I would wonder if they considered it anachronistic to tag it as "Father" given the span of time over which the understanding of the Trinity developed.

Interesting idea - thanks MJ

Looking into this a bit further the "God - Father" tag is within the context (i.e. a subset) of God being the God of the Israelite people so it wouldn't really be appropriate to just carry that on directly into the New Testament.

LimJK

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/738241#Comment_738241

I don't know the thinking of Logos on this but if I were to try to defend it, I would wonder if they considered it anachronistic to tag it as "Father" given the span of time over which the understanding of the Trinity developed.

MJ,

I am a lay person totally new to the Logos concept of Bible Sense and see the potential that I can benefit from this; helping me look up biblical passages with the same Sense across OT & NT and helping me see the range of Senses when I am studying a particular word.

Maybe if I narrow my questions in the Original Post.

Let's just look at <Sense God ⇔ father> that happened to be tagged only in the OT and not in NT. If we look at (<Person God> ANDEQUALS father) I noticed that ALL the hits in NT does not even have a Bible Sense Tag at all, even if there is a variation from the OT <Sense God ⇔ father> ... Would this qualify as a Bug?
I got your point that Sense of the word can change with passage of time. However I hope senses like "righteousness", "faithfulness", etc ... including attributes of God do not change over the passage of time [:)]

<Sense = righteousness>
<Sense = faithfulness>

PS: Always enjoy reading your posts

Schumitinu

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/738228#Comment_738228

Clearly a search for only one of these senses will not render complete results. It seems to me the tagging needs to be simplified and consistent. I don't care if a prayer is considered an act or petition when I am searching for prayers. I don't care whether someone is begging or simply praying when I am searching for prayers.

Fred,

I think it is nice to have we can have some kind of a structure like LN so that we are able to search for all <Sense = Pray> to catch all as well as the options to look at the sub-sense <Sense = Pray (Beg)>

This shows that the BSL and LN even though similar are not the same. They are structured differently and can therefore be used differently. I do like the LN categories and find them very useful and still hope that the Hebrew counterpart will make it into Logos as soon as it gets published (see this thread: https://community.logos.com/forums/t/17037.aspx). But it would also require tagging the OT just like the NT has been done for LN numbers.

LimJK

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/738259#Comment_738259

This shows that the BSL and LN even though similar are not the same. They are structured differently and can therefore be used differently. I do like the LN categories and find them very useful and still hope that the Hebrew counterpart will make it into Logos as soon as it gets published (see this thread: https://community.logos.com/forums/t/17037.aspx). But it would also require tagging the OT just like the NT has been done for LN numbers.

Schumitinu,

Thanks for pointing me to the 5 year long discussion thread on "Semantic Domains for the Old Testament available in English Bibles" which I was not aware off. Yes, love to have LN for OT please [:)]

I must confess that some of the deeper discussions are way over my head. As a layperson I was just trying to figure out how Logos Bible Sense can be use dependably for my studies. As a layperson, I would expect that if I want to look for some Bible Sense of a word across OT and NT, I should find them for it to be useful for me.

I hope to be able to learn more about leveraging Logos Bible Sense for my studies. I have looked at some Logos 6 Video Tutorial Demos hoping to see how others use them practically and benefit from it.

Jeremy Thompson

It looks like there are three issues under discussion here:

The case of "Father" when it refers to God
Cases of inconsistency
Cases of wanting to study concepts like "pray"

I'll comment on each in turn.

1. I didn't work on the Greek New Testament, but my understanding is that "Father" was probably not annotated in the New Testament because it was being treated as a proper noun. We didn't deal with proper nouns for the BSL so as not to tread the same ground as Biblical People (now part of Factbook). For example, you can go to the entry for "God" in Factbook. There is a section entitled "REFERRED TO AS." Underneath that heading is a section for "God referred to as Father."

2. In some cases, there are genuine differences between testaments. We tried not to impose one overarching definition where we believed that to be the case. But, in other cases, we have been inconsistent. Often this is due to us working on Hebrew and Greek independently so as not to superimpose one language's concepts on another language's concepts then attempting to merge languages after the fact. So, there was a tension between trying to treat each language on its own terms and also trying to capture the overlap. I apologize for any issues that this has caused in your using the tool and will certainly add the issues mentioned in this post to a case for looking at inconsistencies.

3. MJ has rightly answered concerns about looking at concepts like "to pray." One of the goals of the BSL was to deal with the ambiguity often inherent in words ("to tease out distinctions"). A word like "pray" may not be quite so nuanced to provide a good example of that goal. This blog post deals with this in a bit more detail in the case of a word like "house": https://blog.logos.com/2014/01/find-the-right-meaning-with-the-bible-sense-lexicon/

In terms of looking at broader concepts like "pray", that is one of the goals of the Lexham Theological Wordbook. It has an entry on prayer. The "See Also" section contains lists of senses that would allow you to explore a concept further using the Bible Sense Lexicon. So, that would provide an inroads to using the Bible Sense Lexicon in this way.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/740112#Comment_740112

It looks like there are three issues under discussion here:

The case of "Father" when it refers to God

Cases of inconsistency

Cases of wanting to study concepts like "pray"

I'll comment on each in turn.

In terms of looking at broader concepts like "pray", that is one of the goals of the Lexham Theological Wordbook. It has an entry on prayer. The "See Also" section contains lists of senses that would allow you to explore a concept further using the Bible Sense Lexicon. So, that would provide an inroads to using the Bible Sense Lexicon in this way.

Jeremy, Thanks for your reply, but I think you missed my point. The subject of prayer was just an example to illustrate what I see as a shortcoming in the BSL. There are many topics / subjects where that would also apply. My point is that if someone wanted to do a search for all the _____ (prayers was just an example) they would have to know every sense associated with ______ (again prayers are just an example) before they could perform a complete search. There should be a way to identify a broad category of the sense and then drill down if desired. In other words if I want to identify all the prayers (just and example) I can search <sense to pray> and it will return every prayer. I can drill down from there to find only those prayers that are considered begging.

Andrew Batishko

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/740166#Comment_740166

Fred, I might not be understanding what you are asking for, but compare the results for the following two searches:

<Sense prayer (act)>
<Sense = prayer (act)>

The first one shows results for everything tagged with "prayer (act)" or any of the descendant senses ("blessing" and "petition"). The second shows only those things tagged with "prayer (act)".

So, you can search for a broad category, and you can use the BSL to "walk" up/down the tree to identify the broad/narrow category you might be specifically interested in.

Doc B

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/740166#Comment_740166

There should be a way to identify a broad category of the sense and then drill down if desired.

Yes!

And an exhaustive list of these categories should appear in the search box where search tips appear for some types of searches.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/740211#Comment_740211

Right. I get that. That fine if my goal is to gather the 75 hits for this sense. This search will miss other verses however. For example Isaac prayer for Rebecca in Genesis 25:21. That is not returned in this search because that one is tagged with the sense "to pray" which falls under the broader category of communication vs prayer (act) which is an activity.

Andrew Batishko

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/740219#Comment_740219

Right. I get that. That fine if my goal is to gather the 75 hits for this sense. This search will miss other verses however. For example Isaac prayer for Rebecca in Genesis 25:21. That is not returned in this search because that one is tagged with the sense "to pray" which falls under the broader category of communication vs prayer (act) which is an activity.

Ah, I see. I don't really have the knowledge to speak to that, but It sounds to me that your desired hierarchical structure is different than that chosen by the people that put together the BSL. They were attempting to represent certain structures while you are desiring different ones. This is a really common problem with any kind of semantic hierarchy.

I'll back out of the conversation here. [:)]

Doc B

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/740220#Comment_740220

I'll back out of the conversation here.

Understood. It would be great that, as you back away, you shove one of your colleagues who put together the BSL (politely, of course) into your spot at the rail. [:D]

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/740220#Comment_740220

It is probably best for me to back out as well. I am not a semantic higharky (just kidding I know how to spell it) expert either.[:|]

Andrew Batishko

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/740224#Comment_740224

I'll back out of the conversation here.

Understood. It would be great that, as you back away, you shove one of your colleagues who put together the BSL (politely, of course) into your spot at the rail.

Jeremy is much more competent to answer than I am.

Jeremy Thompson

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/740166#Comment_740166

Jeremy, Thanks for your reply, but I think you missed my point. The subject of prayer was just an example to illustrate what I see as a shortcoming in the BSL. There are many topics / subjects where that would also apply. My point is that if someone wanted to do a search for all the _____ (prayers was just an example) they would have to know every sense associated with ______ (again prayers are just an example) before they could perform a complete search. There should be a way to identify a broad category of the sense and then drill down if desired. In other words if I want to identify all the prayers (just and example) I can search <sense to pray> and it will return every prayer. I can drill down from there to find only those prayers that are considered begging.

Fred:

I think I understand better what you are getting at. My last reply was to the effect that the initial goal of the BSL was to find specific concepts and not broad conceptual categories. With that said, though, do you (and others here as well) think it would be useful to have a search like: <Sense CONTAINS pray>? This could essentially find all occurrences of senses where the string "pray" occurs in the label for the sense. No promises, but if you think that would let you do what you are talking about here, I can pass along the suggestion. Or even better, you or someone else here might suggest it in the Suggestions area of the forum to see if it garners other user support: https://community.logos.com/forums/28.aspx . I'm not sure if I'm technically supposed to post there, though I'm always glad to see any more features added that would get more people using the BSL [:)].

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/740282#Comment_740282

Thanks for your reply Jeremy. I would like to see a the ability to search for <Sense CONTAINS ______>. It would be great if when that is entered we saw the drop down (that we currently see) with all sense options (i.e. to pray, prayer (act), etc.) This would give the user the option to search for everything that contains pray or drill down to something more specific.

I will create a suggestion in that forum.

William Gabriel

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/740282#Comment_740282

With that said, though, do you (and others here as well) think it would be useful to have a search like: <Sense CONTAINS pray>? This could essentially find all occurrences of senses where the string "pray" occurs in the label for the sense.

I think this suggestion would be incredibly helpful. I'm going to reply to Andrew in a minute with another suggestion.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/740511#Comment_740511

I created a suggestion here

William Gabriel

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/740220#Comment_740220

It sounds to me that your desired hierarchical structure is different than that chosen by the people that put together the BSL. They were attempting to represent certain structures while you are desiring different ones. This is a really common problem with any kind of semantic hierarchy.

I believe the semantic tree that was created has a good structure. I think we need another dimension, another tree that organizes along senses that make sense to group together. So you might have a new branch "Pray" that points to all the leaves that are in disparate branches of the current tree. You may have a new branch "House" that points to all the varied uses of House, even though they might be radically different in semantic meaning.

I know this would be another large undertaking, both in coding and tagging, but I think average Bible study users (raising my hand here) would get tremendous benefit from having datasets that track with common thinking.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/740516#Comment_740516

I believe the semantic tree that was created has a good structure. I think we need another dimension, another tree that organizes along senses that make sense to group together. So you might have a new branch "Pray" that points to all the leaves that are in disparate branches of the current tree. You may have a new branch "House" that points to all the varied uses of House, even though they might be radically different in semantic meaning.

I know this would be another large undertaking, both in coding and tagging, but I think average Bible study users (raising my hand here) would get tremendous benefit from having datasets that track with common thinking.

What is necessary for this to work is for you to define the additional semantic relationships you want captured. Otherwise it ceases to be a semantic lexicon. Or do you mean expanding the currently relationships to allow "multiple inheritance" i.e. removing the hierarchy restriction and allowing networks of meaning? Or put another way "senses that make sense to group together" needs to be defined as to why it makes sense to group them together otherwise it becomes private. By this I mean I group together a Christmas cactus, a Dresden china tea cup and a white porcelain angel - everyone in my immediate family would instantly recognize the category as "things I was given before age 10 by important unrelated women in my life". That is a meaningful group but it is neither semantic nor public.

That said, I believe that the Bible sense lexicon should be a network not a hierarchy and would like to see the kinds of semantic relationships represented expanded.

Bradley Grainger (Logos)

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/740610#Comment_740610

That said, I believe that the Bible sense lexicon should be a network not a hierarchy and would like to see the kinds of semantic relationships represented expanded.

It is a network: for example, "cognitive content" relates to "internal feature" via two different paths.

logos4:Senses;KeyId=ws.cognitive_content.n.01

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/740640#Comment_740640

Thank you very much - a previous Faithlife post had led me to believe it was strictly hierarchy. I am much relieved.

William Gabriel

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/740610#Comment_740610

What is necessary for this to work is for you to define the additional semantic relationships you want captured. Otherwise it ceases to be a semantic lexicon. Or do you mean expanding the currently relationships to allow "multiple inheritance" i.e. removing the hierarchy restriction and allowing networks of meaning? Or put another way "senses that make sense to group together" needs to be defined as to why it makes sense to group them together otherwise it becomes private. By this I mean I group together a Christmas cactus, a Dresden china tea cup and a white porcelain angel - everyone in my immediate family would instantly recognize the category as "things I was given before age 10 by important unrelated women in my life". That is a meaningful group but it is neither semantic nor public.

That said, I believe that the Bible sense lexicon should be a network not a hierarchy and would like to see the kinds of semantic relationships represented expanded.

I am asking for extra definitions and semantic relationships. Perhaps what I'm asking has too large a scope since we could argue of any number of potential relationships--and we'd probably squabble about them too--but it seems like some groupings make for common sense.

Based on Bradley's response, it sounds like a particular sense can have multiple inheritance / networking. So they'd at least be capable of creating trees with multiple origins.

We currently have:

activity -> worship -> prayer (act)

communication -> message (content) -> prayer (contents)

request -> petition (formal) -> prayer (petition) -> prayer vow

writing (product) -> sacred text -> prayer (text)

These are good senses, I don't disagree with them one bit. But when a typical Christian thinks of Prayer, all of the above are included in that sense, so it seems like you need a prayer root that contains all of them but also keeps the established tree intact.

What comes before it? I'm not sure--maybe communication still.

Or, perhaps each one of these little-p prayers get's a big P Prayer before it and it becomes an abstract root that works with <sense Prayer>

activity -> worship -> Prayer -> prayer (act)

communication -> message (content) -> Prayer -> prayer (contents)

request -> petition (formal) -> Prayer -> prayer (petition) -> prayer vow

writing (product) -> sacred text -> Prayer -> prayer (text)

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/740658#Comment_740658

Okay, I understand better what you want - the problem nicknamed the tennis problem ... how to gather together the unrelated elements - ball, net, racquet, backboard, court ... that come together in a tennis games but are not related by any of the standard semantic relationships ... that is the problem that semantic domains are designed to resolve. Certainly the sense lexicon can be categorized into semantic domains and I can see how that would be a useful tool. But it is something very different than what the BSL is designed to achieve. The closest analogy I can think of is that the BSL is designed like a grocery store - produce here, meat there, baking supplies on the 4th aisle ... And you want it organized by recipe ... everything needed for chili con carne here, for potato salad there etc. The for a recipe approach is quite common for "foreign" recipes requiring exotic ingredients. Bothe are useful but they are two different things..

Schumitinu

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/740516#Comment_740516

It sounds to me that your desired hierarchical structure is different than that chosen by the people that put together the BSL. They were attempting to represent certain structures while you are desiring different ones. This is a really common problem with any kind of semantic hierarchy.

I believe the semantic tree that was created has a good structure. I think we need another dimension, another tree that organizes along senses that make sense to group together. So you might have a new branch "Pray" that points to all the leaves that are in disparate branches of the current tree. You may have a new branch "House" that points to all the varied uses of House, even though they might be radically different in semantic meaning.

I know this would be another large undertaking, both in coding and tagging, but I think average Bible study users (raising my hand here) would get tremendous benefit from having datasets that track with common thinking.

The other dimension that we are missing is what is called "contextual domains". What the BSL provides and FL has done an excellent job with are "lexical domains". That is why 'prayer (an act)' and 'to pray' are separated. One is looking at nouns the other at verbs, which has been kept separated. Now, what we are looking for are another set of labels that could be added to the lexical labels which would group these senses together as concepts. In our case "Prayer". I have already suggested a framework for this (see for example for prayer: http://semdom.org/v4/4.9.5.2).

I wasn't aware that the Lexham Theological Wordbook summarizes the senses for that concept. That is already a step in the right direction. And I also found the same to be true in the cultural concept sections. Very helpful. This however cannot be searched easily. And I think that is our main point. How to make these concepts searchable. Would one way to solve this be to add a search query to those entries in the Lexham Theological Wordbook and the Cultural Concept section?

The search ability that has been suggested (CONTAINS) might work too. Whatever FL comes up with I whish that the search can be used in Visual Filters. Please consider that.

Correction: the cultural concept sections do not contain the word senses. This is a separate section in the Factbook.