Abstract

A formal ontology does not contain lexical knowledge; it is by nature language-independent. Mappings can be added between the ontology and, arbitrarily, many lexica in any number of languages. The result of this operation is what is here referred to as a cross-language ontology. A cross-language ontology can be a useful resource for machine translation or cross-language information retrieval. This chapter focuses on ways of automatically building an ontology by exploiting cross-language information from parallel corpora. The goal is to improve the automatic learning results compared to learning an ontology from resources in a single language. The authors present a framework for cross-language ontology learning, providing a setting in which cross-language evidence (data) can be integrated and quantified. The aim is to investigate the following question: Can cross-language data teach us more than data from a single language for the ontology learning task?