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Overcoming Linguistic Barriers to the Multilingual Semantic Web

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Towards the Multilingual Semantic Web

Abstract

I analyze Berners-Lee, Hendler, and Lassila’s description of the Semantic Web, discussing what it implies for a Multilingual Semantic Web and the barriers that the nature of language itself puts in the way of that vision. Issues raised include the mismatch between natural language lexicons and hierarchical ontologies, the limitations of a purely writer-centered view of meaning, and the benefits of a reader-centered view. I then discuss how we can start to overcome these barriers by taking a different view of the problem and considering distributional models of semantics in place of purely symbolic models.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I will refer to these authors, and metonymously to this paper, as BLHL.

  2. 2.

    Wilks (2009), echoed by Borin (2012), suggests that, a fortiori, “ontologies” as presently constructed are nothing more than substandard lexicons disguised as something different.

  3. 3.

    Thanks to Kazuko Nakajima for the translation of this text from Japanese.

  4. 4.

    For example, contemporary researchers in biodiversity have trouble searching the legacy literature in the field because diachronic changes both in the terminology and in the conceptual understanding of the domain result in there being no shared ontologies. “Even competent and well-intentioned researchers often have difficulties searching this literature. Simple Google-style keyword searches are frequently insufficient, because in this literature, more so perhaps than most other fields of science, related concepts are often described or explained in different terms, or in completely different conceptual frameworks, from those of contemporary research. As a result, interesting and beneficial relations with legacy publications, or even with whole literatures, may remain hidden to term-based methods” (Hirst et al. 2013).

  5. 5.

    The collaborative annotation of a Semantic Web page with semantic interpretations generated by software agents that are beyond the control of its author raises many issues that are outside the scope of this chapter. The annotations might be objectionable to the author or counterproductive to his or her goals; they could be willfully misleading or outright vandalism. While these issues may also arise with the present-day public tagging or bookmarking of sites by users (Breslin et al. 2009), their scale is greatly magnified when the annotations become a central part of the Semantic Web retrieval mechanism rather than merely some user’s advisory opinion.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported financially by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. For helpful comments, I am grateful to Lars Borin, Philipp Cimiano, Nadia Talent, the anonymous reviewers, and the participants of the Dagstuhl Seminar on the Multilingual Semantic Web.

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  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5S 3G4

    Graeme Hirst

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  1. Graeme Hirst
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Correspondence to Graeme Hirst .

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  1. National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

    Paul Buitelaar

  2. Universität Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany

    Philipp Cimiano

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Hirst, G. (2014). Overcoming Linguistic Barriers to the Multilingual Semantic Web. In: Buitelaar, P., Cimiano, P. (eds) Towards the Multilingual Semantic Web. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43585-4_1

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