Retrieving Information from the French Lexical Network in RDF/OWL Format

Retrieving Information from the French Lexical Network in RDF/OWL Format Alexsandro Fonseca1, Fatiha Sadat1 and Franc¸ois Lareau2 1University of Quebec in Montreal, 2University of Montreal 1201 President Kennedy, Montreal, Canada, 2C.P. 6128 succ. Centre-Ville, Montreal, Canada affonseca@gmail.com, sadat.fatiha@uqam.ca, francois.lareau@umontreal.ca Abstract In this paper, we present a Java API to retrieve the lexical information from the French Lexical Network, a lexical resource based on the Meaning-Text Theory’s lexical functions, which was previously transformed to an RDF/OWL format. We present four API functions: one that returns all the lexical relations between two given vocables; one that returns all the lexical relations and the lexical functions modeling those relations for two given vocables; one that returns all the lexical relations encoded in the lexical network modeled by a specific lexical function; and one that returns the semantic perspectives for a specific lexical function. This API was used in the identification of collocations in a French corpus of 1.8 million sentences and in the semantic classification of these collocations. Keywords: lexical network, lexical functions, Meaning-Text Theory, ontology, RDF, OWL 1. Introduction The languages RDF/OWL have been an important tool for building interconnected resources in the web, due to their simplicity. RDF allows the construction of knowl- edge graphs. OWL allows the inference of logical relations among the objects represented in those graphs and the cre- ation of classes of objects. RDF and OWL are, to date, the most successful knowledge representation languages (Hendler and van Harmelen, 2008). The set of resources in RDF/OWL format that are connected to each other through the internet is known as the Semantic Web. Linguistic resources have been developed on top of RDF/OWL or transformed into an RDF/OWL format. As examples, we cite: WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998), DBPedia Wiktionary,1 FrameNet (Fillmore, 1977), etc. For a more detailed representation of linguistic information, however, the RDF/OWL languages are not sufficient. For this reason, metalinguistic ontologies were developed to represent information such as part of speech, direct object, noun phrase, etc. Those metalinguistic ontologies evolved into the lexicon model for ontologies (lemon) (McCrae et al., 2011), the most recent ISO standard for the representa- tion of lexical information in the Semantic Web. We have developed a metalinguistic ontology (lexfom) to represent Meaning Text Theory’s (MTT) lexical functions. Lexfom uses the lemon model to represent information about lexical entries and lexical senses. This ontology was applied in the transformation of the French Lexical Net- work into an RDF/OWL format. In this paper, we present a Java API that was developed to retrieve the lexical and combinatorial information from the French Lexical Network, which is based on lexical func- tions, in an RDF/OWL format. This paper is divided as follows. In §2., we present the no- tions behind our API: the lexical functions and the French Lexical Network, a semantic classification of lexical func- tions and the metalinguistic ontologies, including the on- tology that we have developed to represent MTT’s lexical functions. 1www.dbpedia.org/page/Wiktionary In §3., we present the functions that we have developed in our …

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