Formalising and bottom-up enriching the ontology of a Generative Lexicon

This paper presents on-going research to formalise the ontology of a computational lexicon in OWL (W3C standard) as well as to enrich it by applying a bottom-up approach that extracts semantic information from the lexicon. The resource used follows the Generative Lexicon (GL) theory and therefore (1) puts a challenge to ontology design as its semantic types are multidimensional and (2) enables the acquisition of further knowledge on concepts from semantic units. The formalisation allows the ontology to be processed by Description Logics reasoners as well as to be employed in Semantic Web applications. Moreover, the lexicon-driven enrichment increases the semantic information present in the ontology making it appropriate for ontology-driven Natural Language Processing. Finally, the paper studies the application of these procedures to a subsequent GL-based biological resource.