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Multilingual Conceptual Access to Lexicon Based on Shared Orthography: An Ontology-Driven Study of Chinese and Japanese

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Language Production, Cognition, and the Lexicon

Part of the book series: Text, Speech and Language Technology ((TLTB,volume 48))

Abstract

In this paper we propose a model for ontology-driven conceptual access to multilingual lexicon taking advantage of the cognitive-conceptual structure of radical system embedded in shared orthography of Chinese and Japanese. Our proposal rely crucially on two facts. First, both Chinese and Japanese use Chinese characters (hanzi/kanji) in their orthography. Second, the Chinese character orthography is anchored on a system of radical parts which encodes basic concepts. Each character as an orthographic unit contains radicals which indicate the broad semantic class of the meaning of that unit. Our study utilizes the homomorphism between the Chinese hanzi and Japanese kanji systems, but goes beyond the character-to-character mapping of kanji-hanzi conversion, to identify bilingual word correspondences. We use bilingual dictionaries, including WordNets, to verify semantic relation between the cross-lingual pairs. These bilingual pairs are then mapped to ontology of characters structured according to the organization of the basic concepts of radicals. The conceptual structure of the radical ontology is proposed as the model for simultaneous conceptual access to both languages. A study based on words containing characters composed of the “口 (mouth)” radical is given to illustrate the proposal and the actual model. It is suggested that the proposed model has the conceptual robustness to be applied to other languages based on the fact that it works now for two typologically very different languages and that the model contains Generative Lexicon (GL)-like coercive links to account for a wide range of possible cross-lingual semantic relations.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www2.nict.go.jp/r/r312/EDR/index.html.

  2. 2.

    The categories of the concepts represented by radicals are extended based on Qualia structure. Each category in Table 10 and appendix was manually analyzed and assigned.

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Acknowledgments

Earlier version of this paper was presented at CogALex 2008 and we would like to thank Michael Zock and other participants for their helpful comments. We would also like to thank anonymous reviewers of this volume for their constructive suggestions. Work done on this paper was partially supported by grant GRF-543512 from Hong Kong RGC.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China

    Chu-Ren Huang

  2. National Taipei University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Ya-Min Chou

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  1. Chu-Ren Huang
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Correspondence to Chu-Ren Huang .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. CNRS-LIF, UMR 7279, Aix-Marseille University, City, France

    Núria Gala

  2. CNRS-LIF, UMR 7279, Aix-Marseille University and University of Mainz, Marseille, France

    Reinhard Rapp

  3. CNRS-LIF, UMR 7279, Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France

    Gemma Bel-Enguix

Appendix A: The Dimension of “口(Mouth) Conceptual Extension”

Appendix A: The Dimension of “口(Mouth) Conceptual Extension”

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Huang, CR., Chou, YM. (2015). Multilingual Conceptual Access to Lexicon Based on Shared Orthography: An Ontology-Driven Study of Chinese and Japanese. In: Gala, N., Rapp, R., Bel-Enguix, G. (eds) Language Production, Cognition, and the Lexicon. Text, Speech and Language Technology, vol 48. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08043-7_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08043-7_9

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