A Common Ontology for Linguistic Concepts

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A Common Ontology for Linguistic Concepts

• Scott Farrar
• University of Arizona

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Endangered Languages

• As many as half of the worlds languages are in
  danger of disappearing LaPolla (1998)
• Including Many languages in the Americas (Hopi),
  Africa, Australia (), and Southeast Asia (Biao
  Min).

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EMELD

• EMELD (Electronic Metastructure for Endangered
  Languages Data)
• One of Application of EMELD Make endangered
  languages available on the Semantic Web

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Linguistic Field Work

• Linguists collect data
• Datasets (grammars, dictionaries, or glossed
  corpora)
• Hopi example of kachina
• sivu-ikwiw-ta-qa
• vessel-carry on back-DUR-REL

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Problems Concerning Data Interoperability

• Dataset can vary according to
• markup
• theoretical style
• natural language semantics
• Az épület-be mégy-ek.
• the building-IllativeCase go-1P/SING
• I am going into the building.

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Problems Concerning Data Interoperability

• Linguistic Data is Dynamic
• New data is collected.
• Datasets are revised.
• Theory changes.

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Standardization is not Viable

• Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) (Sperberg-McQueen
  and Burnard 1994)
• Corpus Encoding Standard (CES) (Ide and Romary
  2000)

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Towards a Solution

• Data Storage and Distributionlocal or
  distributed?
• Data model for linguistic datasets
• Linguistic ontology

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EMELD Architecture
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Linguistic Ontology

• Conceptual Model for the Linguistics domain
• (special focus on morpho-syntax)
• Built on top of the Standard Upper Merged
  Ontology (SUMO) (Niles and Pease 2001)
• already includes a number of concepts relating to
  semiotics and linguistics
• incorporates concepts from a number of top-level
  ontologies
• peer-reviewed and freely available

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Backbone Taxonomy

• Entity
• Physical
• Object
• ContentBearingObject
• Icon
• SymbolicString
• LinguisticExpression
• WrittenLinguisticExpression
• Text
• Sentence
• Phrase
• Word
• Morpheme
• SpokenLinguisticExpression
• Dialogue
• Sentence
• Phrase
• Word
• Morpheme

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Backbone Taxonomy (continued)
Abstract Class Relation Predicate Gramma
ticalRelation Aspect Tense Case
Agreement Attribute GrammaticalAttribute G
ender Person Number
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Morphosyntactic Case

• Case
• InherentCase
• Spatio-KineticCase
• PositionalCase
• InessiveCase
• DirectionalCase
• IllativeCase
• ExistentialCase
• AbessiveCase
• PartitiveCase
• InstrumentalCase
• StructuralCase
• GenitiveCase
• ErgativeCase
• NominativeCase

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Future directions

• Include the domains of phonology and discourse
  analysis.
• The linguistics ontology has applications beyond
  the immediate EMELD project
• as part of an expert system for reasoning about
  language data
• as part of an interlingua designed for machine
  translation systems

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Contact Info

• Scott Farrar
• Will Lewis
• Terry Langendoen
• farrar, wlewis, langendoen
• _at_u.arizona.edu