Basic Lexicon and Shared Ontology for Multilingual Resources: A SUMO+MILO Hybrid Approach

A common conceptual infrastructure is crucial for multilingual language processing and documentation. Global Wordnet (GWN) was proposed as the common infrastructure for linguistically motivated conceptual representations for all languages. Two critical issues in this line of research are: the scarcity of lexical semantic information (especially from endangered languages), and the lack of a shared conceptual core as the basis of multilingual conceptual representation. In this paper, we elaborate and formalize the proposal to build a shared core common ontology based on the Swadesh list as a solution to tackle with these two critical issues. Comparing Swadesh lists from different languages allowed us to build a small shared ontology that reflects direct human experience, and can serve as the cross-lingual conceptual core. These micro-ontologized lexicons can be used as seeds for developing a fully-grown and more comprehensive documentation of linguistically motivated ontology for each language. In terms of formalization, we propose that SUMO+MILO has the appropriate level of abstractness and coverage for mapping from basic lexicon to formal ontology.