From Text to Content: Computational Lexicons and the Semantic Web

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The vision of the Semantic Web is to turn the World Wide Web into a machine-understandable knowledge base. According to this view, Web content is annotated with respect to particular ontologies, which provide the definition of the basic vocabulary and semantics of the annotations. In this paper we will argue that strengthening the synergies between ontology design and computational lexicon development is a key precondition for the Semantic Web and HLT communities to truly benefit of each other’s results. In particular, we will tackle this issue by illustrating a series of requirements that computational lexicons must fulfill in order to become effective resources to contribute to implement the Semantic Web vision. These requirements will be discussed in the context of an existing infrastructure for the development of semantic language resources. Finally, we will argue that the emerging standards for the Semantic Web also provide the ground for the architecture and design of next-generation language resources.