When Conset Meets Synset: A Preliminary Survey of an Ontological Lexical Resource Based on Chinese Characters

This paper describes an on-going project concerning with an ontological lexical resource based on the abundant conceptual information grounded on Chinese characters. The ultimate goal of this project is set to construct a cognitively sound and computationally effective character-grounded machine-understandable resource. Philosophically, Chinese ideogram has its ontological status, but its applicability to the NLP task has not been expressed explicitly in terms of language resource. We thus propose the first attempt to locate Chinese characters within the context of ontology. Having the primary success in applying it to some NLP tasks, we believe that the construction of this knowledge resource will shed new light on theoretical setting as well as the construction of Chinese lexical semantic resources.