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Lexicalizing a Multilingual Ontology for Searching in the Assistive Technology Domain

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Abstract

While even large ontologies are easy to search for experts, this is not the case for end users: They need guidance to find the ontology node which fits their search intentions best. The contribution describes a multilingual and multimodal front end to a database containing products of Assistive Technology, organized as a multilingual taxonomy (EASTIN, ISO 9999). In the mapping of a user query to the “best” ontology node, the variance observed in search requests must be guided to such nodes, which requires lexicalization. The key component is a multilingual terminological database, with its entries pointing to nodes in the taxonomy. The contribution describes its development (term identification), its representation in a lexicalized model, its integration into the natural language search component (including variant treatment and normalization) and its evaluation in the search context (coverage and usability). Problems of ontology lexicalization and localization, as discussed on the side of building the ontologies, are mirrored on the side of searching them.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In a project called EASTIN-CL, supported by the EC under ICT-PSP-2009-5-3, n° 250432.

  2. 2.

    Supported languages are Danish, English, Estonian, German, Italian, Latvian and Lithuanian.

  3. 3.

    cf. www.abledata.com, www.rehadat.de, www.hmi.dk.

  4. 4.

    The same holds for German compounds. Both term types are analysed as sequences of single words.

  5. 5.

    Montiel-Ponsoda et~al. (2009) comment: This model has proven to be more suitable for highly specialized domain ontologies, e.g., in engineering or technical domains.

  6. 6.

    www.ttt.org/oscarstandards/tbx

  7. 7.

    http://www.meta-net.eu/meta-share.

  8. 8.

    As EASTIN-CL also supports spoken input, an additional resource had to be provided, in the form of a pronunciation lexicon for cases where the index terms were not in the system lexicon of the speech recognizer and not recognized by it.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Linguatec, Munich, Germany

    Gregor Thurmair

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  1. Gregor Thurmair
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Correspondence to Gregor Thurmair .

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  1. National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

    Paul Buitelaar

  2. Universität Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany

    Philipp Cimiano

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Thurmair, G. (2014). Lexicalizing a Multilingual Ontology for Searching in the Assistive Technology Domain. In: Buitelaar, P., Cimiano, P. (eds) Towards the Multilingual Semantic Web. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43585-4_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43585-4_18

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