The Ontology of Bulgarian Dialects – Architecture and Information Retrieval

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 4877–4882 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 4877 The Ontology of Bulgarian Dialects – architecture and information retrieval Rositsa Dekova Paisii Hilendarski University of Plovdiv 24, Tsar Assen Str, Plovdiv, Bulgaria rosdek@uni-plovdiv.bg Abstract Following a concise description of the structure, the paper focuses on the potential of the Ontology of the Bulgarian Dialects, which demonstrates a novel usage of the ontological modelling for the purposes of dialect digital archiving and information processing. The ontology incorporates information on the dialects of the Bulgarian language and includes data from 84 dialects, spoken not only on the territory of the Republic of Bulgaria, but also abroad. It encodes both their geographical distribution and some of their main diagnostic features, such as the different mutations (also referred to as reflexes) of some of the Old Bulgarian vowels. The mutations modelled so far in the ontology include the reflex of the back nasal vowel /ѫ/ under stress, the reflex of the back er vowel /ъ/ under stress, and the reflex of the yat vowel /ѣ/ under stress when it precedes a syllable with a back vowel. Besides the opportunity for formal structuring of the considerable amount of data gathered through the years by dialectologists, the ontology also provides numerous possibilities for information retrieval – searches by dialect, country, dialect region, city or village, various combinations of diagnostic features. Keywords: ontology, Bulgarian dialects, Protégé 1. Introduction Although the geographic distribution and the characteristic features of the various dialects of the Bulgarian language have been the focus of many research studies through the years, little has been done in the direction of their digital archiving. Some of the few projects worth mentioning are the Electronic Interactive Map of the Bulgarian Dialectal Division1, the Bulgarian Dialectology as Living Tradition website2 and the attempt for storing and processing dialect data by using an XML-based model within the CLaRK system (Osvenova and Simov, 2007). While the first two are predominantly user-oriented and aim at making the overall information on the Bulgarian dialects visible to the general public as well as to specialists, the last one is focused mainly on the adequate computerization of the linguistic data for easy processing and portability. Recent advances in employing ontologies and ontological modelling for various task-specific and more generalized applications have proven rather powerful and quite adequate in capturing also the specifics of the natural languages. For the purposes of this project, we use the term ontology in the sense of Gruber (2009) to specify a set of representational primitives for modelling a domain of knowledge, where the definitions of these primitives must include information on their meaning and constraints that ensure their logically consistent application. The work presented in the current paper is a novel attempt at using the advantages of ontological modelling for encoding information, both linguistic and extra linguistic, about the Bulgarian dialects. The ontology incorporates data from 84 dialects and …

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