Multilingual Linked Open Data Patterns

Provide Lexical Information

Description

Using this pattern, we can describe the lexical content of longer descriptions.

Context

Longer descriptions that can not be modified or that are preferred to be kept untouched, can be enriched with lexical information.

Example

The following triples describe University of León using external descriptions 

:unileón  a  lemon:LexicalEntry ;
  lemon:decomposition (
    [ lemon:element  :University ]
    [ lemon:element  :Of ]
    [ lemon:element  :León ]
 );
 rdfs:label  "University of León"@en  .

:University  a  lemon:LexicalEntry ;
   lexinfo:partOfSpeech  lexinfo:commonNoun ;
   rdfs:label  "University"@en ; 
   rdfs:label  "Universidad"@es .

:Of  a  lemon:LexicalEntry ; 
   lexinfo:partOfSpeech  lexinfo:preposition ;
   rdfs:label  "of"@en ;
   rdfs:label  "de"@es . 
   
:León  a  lemon:LexicalEntry ; 
   lexinfo:partOfSpeech  lexinfo:properNoun ;
   rdfs:label  "León"

Discussion

Providing lexical metadata for a resource supports fully automated software agents. However, this can also add a complexity overhead to the dataset that may be undesired.

See also

There are several ways to describe lexical information. [Gananis 07] propose NaturalOWL to linguistically annotate ontology concepts while [Hellman 12] propose a URI scheme to refer to fragments of a text. In this way, it is possible to annotate text fragment with assertions about their lexical structure.

Metadata attached to textual information can even be applied to support natural language user interfaces. Much research work is being done regarding the generation of natural language descriptions for RDF and for SPARQL querying [Ell 12,Shekarpour 11] which can benefit from lexical metadata.