A METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK FOR ONTOLOGY

AND MULTILINGUAL TERMONTOLOGICAL DATABASE

CO-EVOLUTION

CHRISTOPHE DEBRUYNE

CRISTIAN VÁSQUEZ

KOEN KERREMANS

ANDRÉS DOMÍNGUEZ BURGOS

INTRODUCTION

Ontologies. Computer-based, shared, agreed, formal conceptualizations for – amongst others – semantic interoperability between autonomously developed and maintained information systems.

Multilingual Terminology Bases (MTBs) are language resources that contain - in several languages - terms (including variants) referring to concepts in specialized domains. Several other types of information can be added to MTBs in order to describe specific properties of a term, its meaning or its use in specific communicative contexts.

Ontologies are meant for a specific purpose whereas MTBs are more general purpose

PROBLEM

Ontologies and MTBs have different purposes. How and what are the benefits of combining these two artifacts and their methods of construction?

At two levels

• Level of the respective artifacts• Level of the construction methods

METHOD: ONTOLOGY ENGINEERING

Hybrid Ontology Engineering

• Method Grounding Ontologies in Social Processes and Natural Language (GOSPL)

• Community grounded agreements on formal and informal concept descriptions

• Formal descriptions by means of fact-orientation• Informal descriptions by means of an artifact called glossary

METHOD: TERMINOLOGY ENGINEERING

Multilingual Termontological Database

• MTB in which some ontological relations are made explicit• Hierarchical relationships as well as non-hierarchical (*)

• Method Termontography• Explicitly distinguishes the linguistic level from the

semantic level

METHOD: HYBRID ONTOLOGY & MTB CO-EVOLUTION

METHOD: HYBRID ONTOLOGY & MTB CO-EVOLUTION

From MTB to Hybrid Ontology

• Retrieval of generic “pre-fact types” • Retrieval of informal descriptions

From Hybrid Ontology to MTB

• Social interactions lead the mining process• Alignment with the hybrid ontology enables natural

language querying• Structuring the query with NLP, generating a first structure

then annotated with the ontology

TOOL

First, eating our own dog food: creation of an MTB (termontography) ontology

Annotation of the MTB to expose data as RDF

• Creation of a SPARQL endpoint

Connection GOSPL Tool with endpoint

TOOL

USE CASE

Used in the context of the cultural domain

• Retrieval of information on cultural events in Brussels• Three languages: NL, FR, EN

• Motivation of Multilingual Termontological Databases

• Different data sources motivate the need of Ω

• Application

• Natural language querying. Query is first parsed to a structure, and alignment with Ω facilitates the translation of that structure into query

• Multilingual interfaces• User comprehension of the results

CONCLUSIONS

Conclusions

• Ontologies and MTBs are two different artifacts, with distinct construction processes

• We examined how these two processes and artifacts can be combined and presented a proposal

• Ideas were implemented in a tool, which will be part of a greater set up

• Used the tool in the context of a project in the cultural domain.

Future work

• Implementation and integration of the natural language query interface

• More testing and user evaluation

THANK YOU!

QUESTIONS?http://www.oscb.be/