Lexicons, Terminologies, Ontologies: Reflections from Experiences in Resource Construction

This contribution aims at highlighting the strong interconnection between lexicons, terminologies and ontologies and especially the fundamental role that ontologies and lexica mutually play. Our view is that lexical resources are evolving in nature, from ontologically based lexicons we are going towards lexically based ontologies. We explore different instantiations of the current trend of using formal ontologies as a core module of computational lexicons, presenting the advantages especially in multilingual and terminological contexts. We present work showing that the lexical knowledge already present in non formal computational lexicons can be exploited to derive or enrich a formal ontology without much manual effort. In the terminology domain, we describe the construction of a resource for biology, directly linked to a parallel domain-ontology, that combines characteristics of both lexicons and terminologies, so that is can allow for intelligent access to content. Finally, we describe our experience in two projects in which formal ontologies play a central role in the context of multilingual computational lexicons, where the ontology is what acts as the glue among the different monolingual lexicons and what provides cross-lingual reasoning capabilities.