Sina Institute, in cooperation with its SIERA partners (Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (BBAW) and University of Milano-Bicocca (UniMiB)) have organized a discussion panel on Cross-Lingual Mapping Semantics at the 7th Global WordNet conference, in Tartu, Estonia in January 25th, 2014. A refereed article on this topic was also authored and presented at the conference, in addition to several other internal project meetings.
The discussion panel “Cross-Lingual Mapping Semantics” moderated by Prof. Mustafa Jarrar, Sina Institute’s director, discussed the challenges in research as well as in industry that are typically faced when constructing and linking Wordnets across different languages, thereby enabling multilingual web interoperability. The panel started with three real-life cases, each discussed a different experience in Wordnets mapping across different languages. Sonja Bosch, from University of South Africa, introduced the challenges in building the African Wordnet. The challenges in mapping between Asian languages were presented by Hitoshi Isahara, Toyohashi University of Technology. Additionally, the challenges in linking Indian language Wordnets were presented by Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.
In the second part of the discussion panel, the panelists presented their experiences and suggestions in linking Wordnets across different languages. Francis Bond, Nanyang Technological University, argued that there cannot be an exact conceptually equivalent concepts across different languages. John P. McCrae, University of Bielefeld, claimed that linking Wordnets across different languages depends on the intended application. German Rigau, University of the Basque Country, discussed the uncertainty in mapping among concepts across different languages. Piek Vossen, VU University Amsterdam, emphasized the trends in using the Inter-Lingual Index according to his experience in Eurowordnet. Christiane Fellbaum, Princeton University, highlighted on the use of the common concepts across the different languages.
A refereed article (co-authored by SIERA partners Mamoun Abu Helou, Matteo Palmonari, Mustafa Jarrar, and Christiane Fellbaum) titled: Towards Building Linguistic Ontology via Cross-Language Matching was also presented at the conference. The article introduced a methodology for mapping linguistic ontologies lexicalized across different languages, with a classification-based semantics for mappings. The article also discussed the experimental design for validating the proposed approach, and discussed its role in creating a reference alignment that can be used in assessing cross-language matching systems.
Several bilateral meetings were conducted between SIERA partners; Sina Institute (Mustafa Jarrar, Mamon Abu Helou, and Mohammad Zeinaldeen) and BBWA (Amanda Hicks and Christiane Fellbaum), to discuss the mapping of Arabic ontology to Koyoto, and the mapping between the Arabic ontology and Wordnet. The partners planned and agreed on some future steps. Moreover, Sina Institute, BBAW, and VU discussed possible future cooperation and potential project ideas for H2020.
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