Combining Ontologies And Natural Language

erschienen December 2010 in: Adelaide, South Australia AOW 2010

Ontologies are a popular concept for capturing semantic knowledge of the world in a computer understandable way. Todays ontological standards have been designed with primarily the logical formalisms in mind and therefore leaving the linguistic information aside. However knowledge is rarely just about the semantic information itself. In order to create and modify existing ontologies users have to be able to understand the information represented by them. Other problem domains (e.g. Natural Language Processing, NLP) can build on ontological information however a bridge to syntactic information is missing. Therefore in this paper we argue that the possibilities of todays standards like OWL, RDF, etc. are not enough to provide a sound combination of syntax and semantics. Therefore we present an approach for the linguistic enrichment of ontologies inspired by cognitive linguistics. The goal is to provide a generic, language independent approach on modelling semantics which can be annotated with arbitrary linguistic information. This knowledge can then be used for a better documentation of ontologies as well as for NLP and other Information Extraction (IE) related tasks.