Preface

Summary

Why should I read this book?

The mapping between knowledge representation and natural language is fast becoming a focal point of both knowledge engineering (KE) and computational linguistics (CL). Ontologies have a special role to play in this interface. They are essential stepping stones (a) from natural language to knowledge representation and manipulation and (b) from formal theories of knowledge to their application in (natural language) processing. Moreover, the emergence of the Semantic Web initiative presents a unique opportunity to bring research results in this area to real-world applications, at the leading edge of human-language technology. An essential and perhaps foundational aspect of the mapping between knowledge representation and natural language is the interface between ontologies and lexical resources. On the one hand, their integration includes, but is not restricted to, the use of ontologies (a) as language-independent structures of multilingual computational lexicons and (b) as powerful tools for improving the performance of existing lexical resources on various natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as word-sense disambiguation. On the other hand, lexical resources constitute a formidable source of information for generating ontological knowledge both at foundational and domain levels.

This current volume aims to be an essential general reference book on the interface between ontology and lexical resources. Given the fast developments in this new research direction, we introduce a general framework with a terminology to accommodate both ontological and lexical perspectives.