Public Guest Lecture: Dr. Paul Buitelaar on 14.12.2009

Public Guest Lecture: Dr. Paul Buitelaar on December 14th, 2009

The PhD program cordially invites you to attend the public guest lecture of Dr. Paul Buitelaar, Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), Galway, Ireland.

Ontologies and the Lexicon: Connecting World and Word Knowledge

When: Monday, 14.12.2009 at 11.00 (s.t.)
Where: Institute of Phonetics und Speech Processing, Schellingstr. 3, VG, 2. floor, room nr 226 (library).

Abstract

Historically, the study of word meaning and of (world) knowledge representation have been first very closely aligned (60s until mid 80s) and then almost completely separated from each other (from mid 80s on). Over the last decades, both communities have developed relatively stable methods, enabling the construction of a significant amount of resources, i.e. ontologies that represent world knowledge on a foundational (DOLCE, BFO), general (SUMO) or domain level (biomedicine, business, government, etc.) vs. lexical semantic databases (wordnets, framenets, etc.) that represent word meaning in general or in specific domains. Although this is a major progression from before, when no such resources existed or only at a much smaller scale, the old question on the relation between word and world knowledge now comes back in a much more practical form, namely in requirements for the integration of ontologies with lexical (semantic) resources for practical applications in semantic (ontology-based) text analysis. Such an integration seems worthwhile as ontologies still mostly lack a representation of the linguistic realization of concepts (as provided by lexical resources) and lexical resources still mostly lack a deeper semantic representation (as provided by ontologies). We propose to organize the integration of ontologies and lexical resources through an ontology-based lexicon format (LexInfo) that tightly integrates linguistic (morphology, syntax) with semantic (ontological) knowledge. The talk will discuss above considerations as well as the basic ideas behind LexInfo, its implementation and possible applications.

About
Paul Buitelaar earned his doctorate with a dissertation on "CoreLex: Systematic Polysemy and Underspecification" at Brandeis University, Waltham, USA. Until 2008 he was senior researcher in the department of Language Technology at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Saarbrücken. Since January 2009 Paul Buitelaar has been senior research fellow and head of the department of Natural Language Processing at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) in Galway, Ireland. His interests lie, among other things, in the area of ontology learning, text mining as well as semantics.