Boosting Lexical Resources for the Semantic Web: Generative Lexicon and Lexicon Interoperability

Computational lexicons can play a key role in the Semantic Web: aiming at making word content machine-understandable, they intend to provide an explicit representation of word meaning, so that it can be directly accessed and used by computational agents, such as large-coverage parsers, modules for intelligent Information Retrieval or Information Extraction. In all these cases, semantic information is necessary to enhance the performance of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools, and to achieve a real understanding of text content. Moreover, in multilingual computational lexicons we find the linguistic (morphosyntactic/semantic) information necessary to establish links among words of different languages, information of great importance for systems performing multilingual text processing, such as Machine Translation, Cross-lingual Information Retrieval. If we look at the past, in the last decade many activities have contributed to substantially advance knowledge and capability of how to represent, create, maintain, acquire, access large lexical repositories. These repositories are rich in linguistic knowledge, and based on best practices and standards that have been consensually agreed on or have been submitted to the international community as de facto standards. Core – or even large – lexical repositories have been and are being built for many languages. Besides WordNet (Fellbaum 1998), important examples are EuroWordNet (Vossen 1998), PAROLE (Ruimy et al. 1998), SIMPLE (Lenci et al. 2000a) in Europe, ComLex (Grishman et al. 1994), FrameNet (Fillmore et al. 2001)