A Model for Language Annotations on the Web

Several annotation models have been proposed to enable a multilingual Semantic Web. Such models hone in on the word and its morphology and assume the language tag and URI comes from external resources. These resources, such as ISO 639 and Glottolog, have limited coverage of the world's languages and have a very limited thesaurus-like structure at best, which hampers language annotation, hence constraining research in Digital Humanities and other fields. To resolve this `outsourced' task of the current models, we developed a model for representing information about languages, the \textbf{Mo}del for \textbf{L}anguage \textbf{A}nnotation (\langmod{}), such that basic language information can be recorded consistently and therewith queried and analyzed as well. This includes the various types of languages, families, and the relations among them. \langmod{} is formalized in OWL so that it can integrate with Linguistic Linked Data resources. Sufficient coverage of \langmod{} is demonstrated with the use case of French

The Shortcomings of Language Tags for Linked Data When Modeling Lesser-Known Languages

In recent years, the modeling of data from linguistic resources with Resource Description Framework (RDF), following the Linked Data paradigm and using the OntoLex-Lemon vocabulary, has become a prevalent method to create datasets for a multilingual web of data. An important aspect of data modeling is the use of language tags to mark lexicons, lexemes, word senses, etc. of a linguistic dataset. However, attempts to model data from lesser-known languages show significant shortcomings with the authoritative list of language codes by ISO 639: for many lesser-known languages spoken by minorities and also for historical stages of languages, language codes, the basis of language tags, are simply not available. This paper discusses these shortcomings based on the examples of three such languages, i.e., two varieties of click languages of Southern Africa together with Old French, and suggests solutions for the issues identified

ToCT: A task ontology to manage complex templates

Natural language interfaces are a well-known approach to grant non-experts access to semantic web technologies. A number of such systems use simple templates to achieve that for English and more elab-orate solutions for other languages. They keep being designed from scratch in an ad hoc manner, since there is no shared conceptualisation of simple templates and there is no model that is formalised using a Semantic Web language to apply the techniques to itself. We aim to address this by proposing a general-purpose solution in the form of a novel model for templates, formalised as a task ontology in OWL,calledToCT. We used it to develop an ontology-driven text generator for isiZulu, a morphologically-rich language, to test its capabilities. The generator verbalises the TBox of an ontology as validationq uestions. This evaluation showed that the task ontology is sufficiently expressive for the template design, which was subsequently verified with user evaluations who judged the texts positivel