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Interchanging lexical resources on the Semantic Web

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Abstract

Lexica and terminology databases play a vital role in many NLP applications, but currently most such resources are published in application-specific formats, or with custom access interfaces, leading to the problem that much of this data is in “data silos” and hence difficult to access. The Semantic Web and in particular the Linked Data initiative provide effective solutions to this problem, as well as possibilities for data reuse by inter-lexicon linking, and incorporation of data categories by dereferencable URIs. The Semantic Web focuses on the use of ontologies to describe semantics on the Web, but currently there is no standard for providing complex lexical information for such ontologies and for describing the relationship between the lexicon and the ontology. We present our model, lemon, which aims to address these gaps while building on existing work, in particular the Lexical Markup Framework, the ISOcat Data Category Registry, SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) and the LexInfo and LIR ontology-lexicon models.

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Notes

  1. Note that LMF is a meta-model and hence other serializations could be consistent with the model. However for the purposes of this paper, we refer to the RDF and XML serializations described at http://www.lexicalmarkupframework.org/.

  2. Note that “lemma” approximately corresponds to “canonical form” in lemon and we specify the xml:lang special property on each string in lemon.

  3. The ISOcat results are based on public data categories, of which there are a total of 3,036 of these 9 lack a specified type and 17 are typed as both simple and complex. Results retrieved 17th January 2012.

  4. See http://dublincore.org/.

  5. We reference ISOcat by the use of the data category number, and put a readable comment to each property. In the diagrams, we put only the readable description.

  6. We note that more precise modelling of the phrase structure of the term is possible using the lemon model. This is described further in the “lemon cookbook” available at http://lexinfo.net/lemon-cookbook.pdf.

  7. i.e., s lemon:reference x 1, s lemon:reference \(x_2\,\vdash\,x_1\) owl:sameAs x 2, if both x 1 and x 2 are individuals.

  8. Here we use our lemon-aligned version of LexInfo, as ISOcat does not currently have many data categories for subcategorisation. Note that it is not strictly necessary to define these properties as subproperties of lemon, as they are already published as such.

  9. Available as part of the lemon Java API.

  10. Available at http://monnetproject.deri.ie/lemonsource.

  11. https://github.com/jmccrae/lemon.api/

  12. http://www.w3.org/community/ontolex/.

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Acknowledgments

The lemon model and associated tools have been developed in the context of the Monnet project, which is funded by the European Union FP7 program under grant number 248458, the CITEC excellence initiative funded by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), the Science Foundation Ireland under Grant No. SFI/08/CE/I1380 (Lion-2), the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation within the Juan de la Cierva program and the Spanish Project BabelData (TIN2010-17550). We would like to thank the following people for their contributions and advice: Axel Polleres (DERI), Antoine Zimmermann (DERI), Dimitra Anastasiou (CNGL), Susan Marie Thomas (SAP), Christina Unger (CITEC), Sue Ellen Wright (Kent State University), Menzo Windhouwer (Universiteit van Amsterdam).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CITEC, University of Bielefeld, Universitätsstraße, Bielefeld, Germany

    John McCrae, Philipp Cimiano & Dennis Spohr

  2. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Campus de Montegancedo, s/n, Boadilla del Monte, Spain

    Guadalupe Aguado-de-Cea, Asunción Gómez-Pérez, Jorge Gracia & Elena Montiel-Ponsoda

  3. DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway, Galway DERI IDA Business Park, Galway, Ireland

    Paul Buitelaar & Tobias Wunner

  4. DFKI, Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Thierry Declerck

  5. Technical University of Delft, Mekelweg 4, Delft, Netherlands

    Laura Hollink

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  1. John McCrae
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  2. Guadalupe Aguado-de-Cea
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Correspondence to John McCrae.

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McCrae, J., Aguado-de-Cea, G., Buitelaar, P. et al. Interchanging lexical resources on the Semantic Web. Lang Resources & Evaluation 46, 701–719 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-012-9182-3

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