Interchanging lexical resources on the Semantic Web

Lexica and terminology databases play a vital role in many NLP applications, but currently most such resources are published in application-specific formats, or with custom access interfaces, leading to the problem that much of this data is in ‘‘data silos’’ and hence difficult to access. The Semantic Web and in particular the Linked Data initiative provide effective solutions to this problem, as well as possibilities for data reuse by inter-lexicon linking, and incorporation of data categories by dereferencable URIs. The Semantic Web focuses on the use of ontologies to describe semantics on the Web, but currently there is no standard for providing complex lexical information for such ontologies and for describing the relationship between the lexicon and the ontology. We present our model, lemon, which aims to address these gap

Using distributional similarity to organise biomedical terminology

We investigate an application of distributional similarity techniques to the problem of structural organisation of biomedical terminology. Our application domain is the relatively small GENIA corpus. Using terms that have been accurately marked-up by hand within the corpus, we consider the problem of automatically determining semantic proximity. Terminological units are dened for our purposes as normalised classes of individual terms. Syntactic analysis of the corpus data is carried out using the Pro3Gres parser and provides the data required to calculate distributional similarity using a variety of dierent measures. Evaluation is performed against a hand-crafted gold standard for this domain in the form of the GENIA ontology. We show that distributional similarity can be used to predict semantic type with a good degree of accuracy

Definitions in ontologies

Definitions vary according to context of use and target audience. They must be made relevant for each context to fulfill their cognitive and linguistic goals. This involves adapting their logical structure, type of content, and form to each context of use. We examine from these perspectives the case of definitions in ontologies

A lexicon for biology and bioinformatics: the BOOTStrep experience

This paper describes the design, implementation and population of a lexical resource for biology and bioinformatics (the BioLexicon) developed within an ongoing European project. The aim of this project is text-based knowledge harvesting for support to information extraction and text mining in the biomedical domain. The BioLexicon is a large-scale lexical-terminological resource encoding different information types in one single integrated resource. In the design of the resource we follow the ISO/DIS 24613 ?Lexical Mark-up Framework? standard, which ensures reusability of the information encoded and easy exchange of both data and architecture. The design of the resource also takes into account the needs of our text mining partners who automatically extract syntactic and semantic information from texts and feed it to the lexicon. The present contribution first describes in detail the model of the BioLexicon along its three main layers: morphology, syntax and semantics; then, it briefly describes the database implementation of the model and the population strategy followed within the project, together with an example. The BioLexicon database in fact comes equipped with automatic uploading procedures based on a common exchange XML format, which guarantees that the lexicon can be properly populated with data coming from different sources

Using LMF to Shape a Lexicon for the Biomedical Domain

This paper describes the design, implementation and population of the BioLexicon in the framework of BootStrep, an FP6 project. The BioLexicon (BL) is a lexical resource designed for text mining in the bio-domain. It has been conceived to meet both domain requirements and upcoming ISO standards for lexical representation. The data model and data categories are compliant to the ISO Lexical Markup Framework and the Data Category Registry. The BioLexicon integrates features of lexicons and terminologies: term entries (and variants) derived from existing resources are enriched with linguistic features, including sub-categorization and predicate-argument information, extracted from texts. Thus, it is an extendable resource. Furthermore, the lexical entries will be aligned to concepts in the BioOntology, the ontological resource of the project. The BL implementation is an extensible relational database with automatic population procedures. Population relies on a dedicated input data structure allowing to upload terms and their linguistic properties and ?pull-and-push? them in the database. The BioLexicon teaches that the state-of-the-art is mature enough to aim at setting up a standard in this domain. Being conformant to lexical standards, the BioLexicon is interoperable and portable to other areas

Identification of Fertile Translations in Medical Comparable Corpora: a Morpho-Compositional Approach

This paper defines a method for lexicon in the biomedical domain from comparable corpora. The method is based on compositional translation and exploits morpheme-level translation equivalences. It can generate translations for a large variety of morphologically constructed words and can also generate 'fertile' translations. We show that fertile translations increase the overall quality of the extracted lexicon for English to French translation

TermEval 2020 : shared task on automatic term extraction using the Annotated Corpora for term Extraction Research (ACTER) dataset

The TermEval 2020 shared task provided a platform for researchers to work on automatic term extraction (ATE) with the same dataset: the Annotated Corpora for Term Extraction Research (ACTER). The dataset covers three languages (English, French, and Dutch) and four domains, of which the domain of heart failure was kept as a held-out test set on which final f1-scores were calculated. The aim was to provide a large, transparent, qualitatively annotated, and diverse dataset to the ATE research community, with the goal of promoting comparative research and thus identifying strengths and weaknesses of various state-of-the-art methodologies. The results show a lot of variation between different systems and illustrate how some methodologies reach higher precision or recall, how different systems extract different types of terms, how some are exceptionally good at finding rare terms, or are less impacted by term length. The current contribution offers an overview of the shared task with a comparative evaluation, which complements the individual papers by all participants

Evaluating gold standard corpora against gene/protein tagging solutions and lexical resources

Motivation The identification of protein and gene names (PGNs) from the scientific literature requires semantic resources: Terminological and lexical resources deliver the term candidates into PGN tagging solutions and the gold standard corpora (GSC) train them to identify term parameters and contextual features.Ideally all three resources, i.e.~corpora, lexica and taggers, cover the same domain knowledge, and thus support identification of the same types of PGNs and cover all of them.Unfortunately, none of the three serves as a predominant standard and for this reason it is worth exploring, how these three resources comply with each other.We systematically compare different PGN taggers against publicly available corpora and analyze the impact of the included lexical resource in their performance.In particular, we determine the performance gains through false positive filtering, which contributes to the disambiguation of identified PGNs. RESULTS: In general, machine learning approaches (ML-Tag) for PGN tagging show higher F1-measureperformance against the BioCreative-II and Jnlpba GSCs (exact matching), whereas the lexicon basedapproaches (LexTag) in combination with disambiguation methods show better results on FsuPrgeand PennBio. The ML-Tag solutions balance precision and recall, whereas the LexTag solutions havedifferent precision and recall profiles at the same F1-measure across all corpora. Higher recall isachieved with larger lexical resources, which also introduce more noise (false positive results). TheML-Tag solutions certainly perform best, if the test corpus is from the same GSC as the trainingcorpus. As expected, the false negative errors characterize the test corpora and - on the other hand- the profiles of the false positive mistakes characterize the tagging solutions. Lex-Tag solutions thatare based on a large terminological resource in combination with false positive filtering produce betterresults, which, in addition, provide concept identifiers from a knowledge source in contrast to ML-Tagsolutions. CONCLUSION: The standard ML-Tag solutions achieve high performance, but not across all corpora, and thus shouldbe trained using several different corpora to reduce possible biases. The LexTag solutions havedifferent profiles for their precision and recall performance, but with similar F1-measure. This resultis surprising and suggests that they cover a portion of the most common naming standards, but copedifferently with the term variability across the corpora. The false positive filtering applied to LexTagsolutions does improve the results by increasing their precision without compromising significantlytheir recall. The harmonisation of the annotation schemes in combination with standardized lexicalresources in the tagging solutions will enable their comparability and will pave the way for a sharedstandard

Approaches towards a Lexical Web: the role of Interoperability

After highlighting some of the major dimensions that are relevant for Language Resources (LR) and contribute to their infrastructural role, I underline some priority areas of concern today with respect to implementing an open Language Infrastructure, and specifically what we could call a ?Lexical Web?. My objective is to show that it is imperative to define an underlying global strategy behind the set of initiatives which are/can be launched in Europe and world-wide, and that it is necessary an allembracing vision and a cooperation among different communities to achieve more coherent and useful results. I end up mentioning two new European initiatives that in this direction and promise to be influential in shaping the future of the LR area

The NCBO OBOF to OWL Mapping

Two of the most significant formats for biomedical ontologies are the Open Biomedical Ontologies Format (OBOF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL). To make it possible to translate ontologies between these two representation formats, the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) has developed a mapping between the OBOF and OWL formats as well as inter-conversion software. The goal was to allow the sharing of tools, ontologies, and associated data between the OBOF and Semantic Web communities.

OBOF does not have a formal grammar, so the NCBO had to capture its intended semantics to map it to OWL.

This official NCBO mapping was used to make all OBO Foundry ontologies available in OWL. 

Availability: This mapping functionality can be embedded into OBO-Edit and Protégé-OWL ontology editors. This software is available at: http://bioontology.org/wiki/index.php/OboInOwl:Main_Pag