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A Multilingual Lexico-Semantic Database and Ontology

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Towards the Multilingual Semantic Web

Abstract

We discuss the development of a multilingual lexicon linked to the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) formal ontology. The ontology as well as the lexicon have been expressed in Web Ontology Language (OWL), as well as their original formats, for use on the semantic web and in linked data. We describe the Open Multilingual Wordnet (OMW), a multilingual wordnet with 22 languages and a rich structure of semantic relations. It is made by exploiting links from various monolingual wordnets to the English Wordnet. Currently, it contains 118,337 concepts expressed in 1,643,260 senses in 22 languages. It is available as simple tab-separated files, Wordnet-Lexical Markup Framework (LMF) or lemon and had been used by many projects including BabelNet and Google Translate. We discuss some issues in extending the wordnets and improving the multilingual representation to cover concepts not lexicalized in English and how concepts are stated in the formal ontology.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.globalwordnet.org/gwa/gwa_grid.html.

  2. 2.

    www.ontologyportal.org.

  3. 3.

    http://sigmakee.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/sigmakee/sigma/suo-kif.pdf.

  4. 4.

    http://www.ontologyportal.org/SUMO.owl.

  5. 5.

    http://www.ontologyportal.org/WordNet.owl.

  6. 6.

    http://sigma-01.cim3.net:8080/sigma/OWL.jsp?kb=SUMO also provides a “live” generation of OWL one term at a time, where “&term=name” can be appended to the URL and the desired term name substituted for “name.”

  7. 7.

    http://globalwordnet.org/.

  8. 8.

    http://compling.ntu.edu.sg/omw.

  9. 9.

    Definition from the Open Knowledge Foundation: http://opendefinition.org/.

  10. 10.

    http://babelnet.org/about.jsp.

  11. 11.

    http://translate.google.com/about/intl/en_ALL/.

  12. 12.

    With the extensions that were added with the Japanese translation by Masato Hagiwara (Bird et al. 2010).

  13. 13.

    Thanks to John P. McCrae for help in adding this.

  14. 14.

    http://nlpwww.nict.go.jp/wn-ja/index.en.html.

  15. 15.

    We are delighted to see that an Open Dutch Wordnet will be released soon (Vossen and Postma 2014) and will integrate it as soon the data is available.

  16. 16.

    Note that according to psycholinguistic studies from Ahrens et al. (1998), there are two types of active complexity in natural language. The first is “triggered complexity” initiated by the speaker that involves puns; the second is “latent complexity” in which no pun or vagueness is intended. The Chinese Wordnet’s model focuses only on latent complexity.

  17. 17.

    It would be possible to link ontologies other than SUMO. There are other ontologies with at least partial links to wordnet, including DOLCE (Gangemi et al. 2003) and the Kyoto Ontology (Laparra et al. 2012). We only discuss SUMO here, as it is both the largest ontology and the most fully integrated with the OMW.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Francis Bond

  2. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Christiane Fellbaum

  3. National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Shu-Kai Hsieh

  4. Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Hong Kong

    Chu-Ren Huang

  5. Articulate Software, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Adam Pease

  6. Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Piek Vossen

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  1. Francis Bond
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  2. Christiane Fellbaum
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  3. Shu-Kai Hsieh
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  4. Chu-Ren Huang
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Correspondence to Francis Bond .

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  1. National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

    Paul Buitelaar

  2. Universität Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany

    Philipp Cimiano

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Bond, F., Fellbaum, C., Hsieh, SK., Huang, CR., Pease, A., Vossen, P. (2014). A Multilingual Lexico-Semantic Database and Ontology. In: Buitelaar, P., Cimiano, P. (eds) Towards the Multilingual Semantic Web. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43585-4_15

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