Towards a new Ontology for Sign Languages

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 3977–3983 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 3977 Towards a new Ontology for Sign Languages Thierry Declerck German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) Saarland Informatics Campus D3 2 66123 Saarbr¨ucken, Germany declerck@dfki.de Abstract We present the current status of a new ontology for representing constitutive elements of Sign Languages (SL). This development emerged from investigations on how to represent multimodal lexical data in the OntoLex-Lemon framework, with the goal to publish such data in the Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) cloud. While studying the literature and various sites dealing with sign languages, we saw the need to harmonise all the data categories (or features) defined and used in those sources, and to organise them in an ontology to which lexical descriptions in OntoLex-Lemon could be linked. We make the code of the first version of this ontology available, so that it can be further developed collaboratively by both the Linked Data and the SL communities. Keywords: Sign Languages, Ontology, Linguistic Linked Open Data, OntoLex-Lemon 1. Introduction There is in the field of electronic lexicography an in- creasing interest in offering ways to represent and in- terlink lexical data originating from different modali- ties. This topic is particularly discussed within initia- tives and projects1 concerned with the representation of lexical data in a Linked Data (LD) compliant for- mat, so that they can be published within the Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) cloud.2 In this context, we could observe that Sign Language (SL) lexical data are not represented in the 227 datasets included by now in the LLOD cloud. Also looking at the “Overview of Datasets for the Sign Languages of Europe” (Kopf et al., 2021) published by the “Easier” European project,3 we do not see any mention of a dataset being available in an LD compliant format. A first intuition for helping to remedy the situation was to provide for a multimodal extension to the OntoLex-Lemon framework (Cimiano et al., 2016), which was originally conceived for covering the writ- ten and phonetic representation of lexical data used in ontologies, as can be seen in the relation ex- isting between the ontolex:LexicalEntry and ontolex:Form classes, which are displayed with the core module of OntoLex-Lemon in Figure 2. But we soon realized that considering only an exten- sion to OntoLex-Lemon would not do justice to the 1For example the H2020 Elexis (https://elex.is/) and Prˆet-`a-LLOD (https://pret-a-llod.github. io/) projects, or the COST Action CA18209 ”NexusLin- guarum - European network for Web-centred linguistic data science” (https://nexuslinguarum.eu/). See also (Declerck et al., 2020) for details on the contributions of those projects to the LLOD framework. 2See http://www.linguistic-lod.org/. 3See https://www.project-easier.eu/ for more details on this project. specificity and richness of SL lexical data and that a thorough LD compliant description of the constitutive elements of SLs would be needed, so that those can be linked at various levels to lexical descriptions in OntoLex-Lemon. In this paper, …

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