Ontologies and Lexical Resources

La revista "Procesamiento de Lenguaje Natural" pretende ser un foro de publicación de artículos científico-técnicos inéditos de calidad relevante en el ámbito de trabajo del Procesamiento de Lenguaje Natural (PLN) tanto para la comunidad científica nacional e internacional, como para las empresas del sector. Además, se pretende potenciar el desarrollo de las diferentes áreas relacionadas con el PLN, mejorar la divulgación de las investigaciones que se llevan a cabo, identificar las futuras directrices de la investigación básica y mostrar las posibilidades reales de aplicación en este campo. Anualmente la SEPLN (Sociedad Española para el Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural) publica dos números de la revista, que incluyen artículos originales, presentaciones de proyectos en marcha, reseñas bibliográficas y resúmenes de tesis doctorales. Esta revista se distribuye gratuitamente a todos los socios, y con el fin de conseguir una mayor expansión y facilitar el acceso a la publicación, su contenido es libremente accesible por Internet.

This thesis is written as part of the preliminary research for a proposed project at the Centre for Text Technology at the North-West University in Potchefstroom, North-West Province, South Africa. In this work a methodology for constructing a wordnet for Afrikaans is proposed, which will be based on the Princeton WordNet that was developed at Princeton University, USA. All relevant concepts are introduced, starting with an analysis of the prototype wordnet, the Princeton WordNet, after which the focus shifts to its extension to multilingual wordnet databases. An investigation is made into the available resources and tools available for the proposed project, after which we verify its feasibility. Afterwards, various methodologies for wordnet construction are investigated and analysed. Based on all these analyses, a detailed methodology with a work schedule is proposed for building a core Afrikaans wordnet, also keeping in mind future extension and potential problems. We conclude that the existence of several automatic techniques have greatly improved the process of wordnet construction compared to a few years ago, but that they are still heavily dependent on quality lexical resources and tools. Finally, some suggestions are made for future extensions and applications of the wordnet.

In this paper we present our work on the usage of lexical resources for the Machine Translation English and Malayalam. We describe a comparative performance between different Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) systems on top of phrase based SMT system as baseline. We explore different ways of utilizing lexical resources to improve the quality of English Malayalam statistical machine translation. In order to enrich the training corpus we have augmented the lexical resources in two ways (a) additional vocabulary and (b) inflected verbal forms. Lexical resources include IndoWordnet semantic relation set, lexical words and verb phrases etc. We have described case studies, evaluations and have given detailed error analysis for both Malayalam to English and English to Malayalam machine translation systems. We observed significant improvement in evaluations of translation quality. Lexical resources do help uplift performance when parallel corpora are scanty.

This paper is about the Greek and Serbian multiword expressions (MWEs) that belong to the rhetorical figure simile. We use a corpus-driven crowdsourcing method to identify the most commonly used similes in Serbian and Greek. We attempt a first comparison of the two sets of data and discuss issues of simile encoding in lexical resources that are useful in Natural Language Processing.

Resumen: La Gramática del Papel y la Referencia es una teoría funcional del lenguaje que permite la representación de un texto de entrada en términos de su estructura lógica. Con el fin de ir más allá de la gramática nuclear, el Modelo Léxico-Construccional, el cual se fundamenta en el modelo teórico anterior, proporciona una descripción más detallada de todos los aspectos implicados en la construcción del significado. Este artículo explora la integración de FunGramKB, una base de conocimiento para el procesamiento del lenguaje natural, en el Modelo Léxico-Construccional, y cómo este enfoque abre una nueva vía hacia la implementación computacional de una teoría de la comprensión del lenguaje dentro del marco de la Gramática del Papel y la Referencia. Palabras clave: Gramática del Papel y la Referencia, Modelo Léxico-Construccional, FunGramKB, comprensión del lenguaje natural, estructura lógica conceptual Abstract: Role and Reference Grammar is a functional theory of language which allows an input text to be represented in terms of its logical structure. In order to go beyond the core grammar, the Lexical Constructional Model, which is grounded on the previous theoretical model, provides a fine-grained description of all aspects involved in meaning construction. This paper explores the integration of FunGramKB, a knowledge base for natural language processing, into the Lexical Constructional Model, and how this approach opens a new road to the computational implementation of a theory of language understanding within the Role and Reference Grammar framework.

The present paper describes the model and database structure of a large-scale lexical resource for the biology domain designed both for human and for machine use. Our lexicon aims at semantic interoperability and extendability. This is achieved through the adoption of the up-coming ...

This paper describes the design, implementation and population of a lexical resource for biology and bioinformatics (the BioLexicon) developed within an ongoing European project. The aim of this project is text-based knowledge harvesting for support to information extraction and ...

ANR-funded Nomage project aims at describing the aspectual properties of deverbal nouns taken from a corpus, in an empirical way. It is centered on the development of two resources: a semantically and syntactically annotated corpus of deverbal nouns based on the French Treebank, and an electronic lexicon, providing descriptions of morphological, syntactic and semantic properties of the deverbal nouns found in our corpus. Both resources are presented in this paper, with a focus on the comparison between corpus data and lexicon data.

Lexical functions are a formalism that describes the combinatorial, syntactic and semantic relations among individual lexical units in different languages. Those relations include both paradigmatic relations, i.e. vertical or " in absence " , such as synonymy, antonymy and meronymy, and syntagmatic relations, i.e. horizontal or " in presence " , such as intensification (deeply committed), confirmative (valid argument) and support verbs (give an order, subject to an interrogation). We present in this paper a new lexical ontology, called Lexical Function Ontology (LFO), as a model to represent lexical functions. The aim is for our ontology to be combined with other lexical ontologies, such as the Lexical Model for Ontologies (lemon) and the Lexical Markup Framework (LMF), and to be used for the transformation of lexical networks into the semantic web formats, enriched with the semantic information given by the lexical functions, such as the representation of syntagmatic relations (e.g. collocations) usually absent from lexical networks.

Contributive resources, such as wikipedia, have proved to be valuable in Natural Language Processing or Multilingual Information Retrieval applications.
This article focusses on Wiktionary, the dictionary part of the collaborative resources sponsored by the \emph{Wikimedia} foundation.

In this article we present a word net that has been extracted from French, English and German wiktionaries. We present the structure of this word net and discuss the specific extraction problems induced by this kind of contributive resources and the method used to overcome them.

Then we show how we represent the extracted data as a Lexical Markup Framework (LMF) compatible lexical network represented in Resource Description Framework (RDF) format.

Lexical functions are a formalism that describes the combinatorial, syntactic and semantic relations among individual lexical units in different languages. Those relations include both paradigmatic relations, i.e. vertical or “in absence”, such as synonymy, antonymy and meronymy, and syntagmatic relations, i.e. horizontal or “in presence”, such as intensification (deeply committed), confirmative (valid argument) and support verbs (give an order, subject to an interrogation). We present in this paper a new lexical ontology, called Lexical Function Ontology (LFO), as a model to represent lexical functions. The aim is for our ontology to be combined with other lexical ontologies, such as the Lexical Model for Ontologies (lemon) and the Lexical Markup Framework (LMF), and to be used for the transformation of lexical networks into the semantic web formats, enriched with the semantic information given by the lexical functions, such as the representation of syntagmatic relations (e.g. coll...

Text to graphics conversion systems receive a text description of an image or animation from the user and convert it into corresponding image or animation. Such systems have applications in education and computer games. In this paper we describe six well-known text to graphics systems by classifying them into two categories: a) systems that convert text into images and b) systems that convert text into animations. In each category, we start with early system and continue with recent works. Then, we compare the systems based on the type of their input and output and their domain and coverage.

Ontologies have recently received popularity in the area of knowledge management and knowledge sharing, especially after the evolution of the Semantic Web and its supporting technologies. An ontology defines the terms and concepts (meaning) used to describe and represent an area of knowledge.The aim of this paper is to identify all possible existing ontologies and ontology management tools (Protégé 3.4, Apollo, IsaViz & SWOOP) that are freely available and review them in terms of: a) interoperability, b) openness, c) easiness to update and maintain, d)
market status and penetration. The results of the review in ontologies are analyzed for each application area, such as transport, tourism, personal services, health and social services, natural languages and other HCI-related domains. Ontology Building/Management Tools are used by different groups of people for performing diverse tasks. Although each tool provides different functionalities, most of the users just use only one, because they are not able to interchange their ontologies from one tool to another. In addition, we considered the compatibility of different
ontologies with different development and management tools. The paper is also concerns the detection of commonalities and differences between the examined ontologies, both on the same domain (application area) and among different domains.

Not many years ago it was usual to comment on the lack of an open lexical-semantic knowledge base, following the lines of Princeton WordNet, but for Portuguese. Today, the landscape has changed significantly, and researchers that need access to this specific kind of resource have not one, but several alternatives to choose from. The present article describes the wordnet-like resources currently available for Portuguese. It provides some context on their origin, creation approach, size and license for utilization. Apart from being an obvious starting point for those looking for a computational resource with information on the meaning of Portuguese words, this article describes the resources available, compares them and lists some plans for future work, sketching ideas for potential collaboration between the projects described.

This paper describes the design, implementation and population of a lexical resource for biology and bioinformatics (the BioLexicon) developed within an ongoing European project. The aim of this project is text-based knowledge harvesting for support to information extraction and ...

This paper describes the design, implementation and population of the BioLexicon in the framework of BootStrep, an FP6 project. The BioLexicon (BL) is a lexical resource designed for text mining in the bio-domain. It has been conceived to meet both domain requirements and ...

The present paper describes the model and database structure of a large-scale lexical resource for the biology domain designed both for human and for machine use. Our lexicon aims at semantic interoperability and extendability. This is achieved through the adoption of the up-coming ...

ANR-funded Nomage project aims at describing the aspectual properties of deverbal nouns taken from a corpus, in an empirical way. It is centered on the development of two resources: a semantically and syntactically annotated corpus of deverbal nouns based on the French Treebank, and an electronic lexicon, providing descriptions of morphological, syntactic and semantic properties of the deverbal nouns found in our corpus. Both resources are presented in this paper, with a focus on the comparison between corpus data and lexicon data.

This paper describes the design, implementation and population of the BioLexicon in the framework of BootStrep, an FP6 project. The BioLexicon (BL) is a lexical resource designed for text mining in the bio-domain. It has been conceived to meet both domain requirements and ...

A lexical function represents a type of relation that exists between lexical units (wo rds or expressions) in any language. For examp le, the antonymy is a type of relat ion that is represented by the lexical function Anti: Anti(big) = small. Those relations include both paradigmatic relations, i.e. vertical relations, such as synonymy, antonymy and meronymy and syntagmatic relat ions, i.e. horizontal relations, such as objective qualification (legitimate demand), subjective qualificat ion (fruitful analysis), positive evaluation (good review) and support verbs (pay a visit, subject to an interrogation). In this paper, we present the Lexical Functions Ontology Model (lexfo m) to represent lexical functions and the relation among lexical units. Lexfo m is divided in four modules: lexical function representation (lfrep), lexical function family (lffam), lexical function semantic perspective (lfsem) and lexical function relations (lfrel). Moreover, we show how it co mbines to Lexical Model for Ontologies (lemon), for the transformation of lexical networks into the semantic web formats. So far, we have implemented 100 simp le and 500 comp lex lexical functions, and encoded about 8,000 syntagmatic and 46,000 paradigmat ic relations, for the French language.

The present paper describes the model and database structure of a large-scale lexical resource for the biology domain designed both for human and for machine use. Our lexicon aims at semantic interoperability and extendability. This is achieved through the adoption of the up-coming ISO standard for lexical representation and through a granular and distributed encoding of relevant information. The first part of this contribution focuses on two aspects of the model that are of particular interest to the Biology community: the treatment of term variants and the alignment with ontological information. The second part of the paper describes the physical implementation of the model: a relational database equipped with a set of automatic uploading procedures. The population relies on an XML input data structure that allows for the structuring of terms with their related properties and to automatically "pull-and-push" them into the database. Peculiarity of the BioLexicon is that it combines features of both terminologies and lexicons: it is able to represent terms and their variants, with some of the semantic relations that link them, and also morphological, syntactic and lexical semantic properties of terms as lexical items.