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A Common Ontology for Linguistic Concepts

A Common Ontology for Linguistic Concepts. Scott Farrar University of Arizona. Endangered Languages. As many as half of the world’s 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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A Common Ontology for Linguistic Concepts

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  1. A Common Ontology for Linguistic Concepts Scott Farrar University of Arizona

  2. Endangered Languages • As many as half of the world’s languages are in danger of disappearing LaPolla (1998) • Including: Many languages in the Americas (Hopi), Africa, Australia (), and Southeast Asia (Biao Min).

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

  4. 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]

  5. 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.

  6. Problems Concerning Data Interoperability • Linguistic Data is Dynamic New data is collected. Datasets are revised. Theory changes.

  7. Standardization is not Viable • Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) (Sperberg-McQueen and Burnard 1994) • Corpus Encoding Standard (CES) (Ide and Romary 2000)

  8. Towards a Solution • Data Storage and Distribution—local or distributed? • Data model for linguistic datasets • Linguistic ontology

  9. GUI EMELD Search Engine Linguistic Ontology Semantic Web Hopi Mocovi Biao Min EMELD Architecture

  10. 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

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

  12. Backbone Taxonomy (continued) Abstract Class Relation Predicate GrammaticalRelation Aspect Tense Case Agreement Attribute GrammaticalAttribute Gender Person Number

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

  14. 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

  15. Contact Info • Scott Farrar • Will Lewis • Terry Langendoen • {farrar, wlewis, langendoen} @u.arizona.edu

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