Collaborative editing of knowledge resources for cross-lingual text mining

The need to smoothly deal with textual documents expressed in different languages is increasingly becoming a relevant issue in modern text mining environments. Recently the research on this field has been considerably fostered by the necessity for Web users to easily search and browse the growing amount of heterogeneous multilingual contents available on-line as well as by the related spread of the Semantic Web. A common approach to cross-lingual text mining relies on the exploitation of sets of properly structured multilingual knowledge resources. The involvement of huge communities of users spread over different locations represents a valuable aid to create, enrich, and refine these knowledge resources. Collaborative editing Web environments are usually exploited to this purpose. This thesis analyzes the features of several knowledge editing tools, both semantic wikis and ontology editors, and discusses the main challenges related to the design and development of this kind of tools. Subsequently, it presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of the Wikyoto Knowledge Editor, called also Wikyoto. Wikyoto is the collaborative editing Web environment that enables Web users lacking any knowledge engineering background to edit the multilingual network of knowledge resources exploited by KYOTO, a cross-lingual text mining system developed in the context of the KYOTO European Project. To experiment real benefits from social editing of knowledge resources, it is important to provide common Web users with simplified and intuitive interfaces and interaction patterns. Users need to be motivated and properly driven so as to supply information useful for cross-lingual text mining. In addition, the management and coordination of their concurrent editing actions involve relevant technical issues. In the design of Wikyoto, all these requirements have been considered together with the structure and the set of knowledge resources exploited by KYOTO. Wikyoto aims at enabling common Web users to formalize cross-lingual knowledge by exploiting simplified language-driven interactions. At the same time, Wikyoto generates the set of complex knowledge structures needed by computers to mine information from textual contents. The learning curve of Wikyoto has been kept as shallow as possible by hiding the complexity of the knowledge structures to the users. This goal has been pursued by both enhancing the simplicity and interactivity of knowledge editing patterns and by using natural language interviews to carry out the most complex knowledge editing tasks. In this context, TMEKO, a methodology useful to support users to easily formalize cross-lingual information by natural language interviews has been defined. The collaborative creation of knowledge resources has been evaluated in Wikyoto

WordNets mapped to Central Ontology

The deliverable describes the progress that has been made toward ontologizing the OntoWordNet with respect to the ontological meta properties of rigidity and non-rigidty, and the progress that has been made toward mapping the Dutch, English, and Italian wordnets onto OntoWordNet. We give a typology of wordnet to ontology mappings, and finally we provide a preliminary discussion of cross lingual rigidity validation within the context of the KYOTO framework

Wordnet-LMF: Fleshing out a Standardized Format for Wordnet Interoperability

In this paper we present Wordnet-LMF, a dialect of ISO Lexical Markup Framework that instantiates LMF for representing wordnets. Wordnet-LMF was developed in the framework of the EU KYOTO project for the specific purpose of endowing a set of wordnets with a standardized interoperability format allowing the interchange of lexico-semantic information encoded in each of them. The aim of this format is twofold a) to give a preliminary assessment of LMF, by large-scale application to real lexical resources; b)to endow WordNet with a format representation that will allow easier integration among resources sharing the same structure (i.e other wordnets) and, more importantly, across resources with different theoretical and implementation approaches

Linking a domain thesaurus to WordNet and conversion to WordNet-LMF

We present a methodology to link domain thesauri to general-domain lexica. This is applied in the framework of the KYOTO project to link the Species2000 thesaurus to the synsets of the English WordNet. Moreover, we study the formalisation of this thesaurus according to the ISO LMF standard and its dialect WordNet-LMF. This conversion will allow Species2000 to communicate with the other resources available in the KYOTO architecture.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

XML Schema for Wordnet and Ontology

This deliverable describes the XML schema adopted to represent all the data related to the management of the multi-language wordnets and the ontology; they constitute the set of linguistic and semantic resources of KYOTO system

KYOTO: A System for Mining, Structuring, and Distributing Knowledge Across Languages and Cultures

We outline work performed within the framework of a current EC project. The goal is to construct a language-independent information system for a specific domain (environment/ecology/biodiversity) anchored in a language-independent ontology that is linked to wordnets in seven languages. For each language, information extraction and identification of lexicalized concepts with ontological entries is carried out by text miners (?Kybots?). The mapping of language-specific lexemes to the ontology allows for crosslinguistic identification and translation of equivalent terms. The infrastructure developed within this project enables long-range knowledge sharing and transfer across many languages and cultures, addressing the need for global and uniform transition of knowledge beyond the specific domains addressed here

Collaborative management of KYOTO Multilingual Knowledge Base: the Wikyoto Knowledge Editor

In this paper we introduce the Wikyoto Knowledge Editor, the wiki Web-based environment where the multilingual and multicultural community of KYOTO users interacts to maintain and extend, with respect to their particular domain of interest, the background knowledge resources of the KYOTO system, constituting the Multilingual Knowledge Base. KYOTO is a knowledge-driven system for fact mining from a multilingual collection of information sources concerning a specific domain of interest. Facts are mined from relevant documents that are linguistically and semantically annotated exploiting the Multilingual Knowledge Base, made of several languagespecific WordNets all referred to a common Central Ontology