Ontologies represent a key ingredient in knowledge management and content-based systems, with tasks ranging from document search and categorization to information extraction and text mining. Designing an ontology actually means to determine the set of semantic categories which properly reflects the particular conceptual organization of the domain of information on which the system must operate, thus optimising the quantity and quality of the retrieved information. Besides, ontologies also represent an important bridge between knowledge representation and computational lexical semantics. Ontologies are widely used as formal devices to represent the lexical content of words, and appear to have a crucial role in different language engineering (LE) tasks, such as content-based tagging, word sense disambiguation, multilingual transfer, etc. In what follows, I will discuss some issues that arise when ontologies are used to provide a general organizational scheme for the lexicon. This task, as we will see, imposes quite hard constraints to the ontology design, especially when the aim of formal representation of word meaning is the development of large-coverage lexical resources to be used in real LE applications. In the second part of the paper, the experience gathered in the European projects LE-SIMPLE will be illustrated, by focusing on a particular proposal for the development of a top-level ontology for general purpose lexicons.

Building an Ontology for the Lexicon: Semantic Types and Word Meaning

LENCI, ALESSANDRO
2001-01-01

Abstract

Ontologies represent a key ingredient in knowledge management and content-based systems, with tasks ranging from document search and categorization to information extraction and text mining. Designing an ontology actually means to determine the set of semantic categories which properly reflects the particular conceptual organization of the domain of information on which the system must operate, thus optimising the quantity and quality of the retrieved information. Besides, ontologies also represent an important bridge between knowledge representation and computational lexical semantics. Ontologies are widely used as formal devices to represent the lexical content of words, and appear to have a crucial role in different language engineering (LE) tasks, such as content-based tagging, word sense disambiguation, multilingual transfer, etc. In what follows, I will discuss some issues that arise when ontologies are used to provide a general organizational scheme for the lexicon. This task, as we will see, imposes quite hard constraints to the ontology design, especially when the aim of formal representation of word meaning is the development of large-coverage lexical resources to be used in real LE applications. In the second part of the paper, the experience gathered in the European projects LE-SIMPLE will be illustrated, by focusing on a particular proposal for the development of a top-level ontology for general purpose lexicons.
2001
Lenci, Alessandro
File in questo prodotto:
Non ci sono file associati a questo prodotto.

I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.

Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11568/172981
 Attenzione

Attenzione! I dati visualizzati non sono stati sottoposti a validazione da parte dell'ateneo

Citazioni
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.pmc??? ND
  • Scopus ND
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.isi??? ND
social impact