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<Paper uid="W03-1905">
  <Title>RDF Instantiation of ISLE/MILE Lexical Entries</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="3" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The eventual vision for computational lexicons is to enable universal access to sophisticated linguistic information, which in turn will serve as a central component for content-based information management on the web. This demands, first of all, some standardized means to represent complex lexical information while retaining the flexibility required to accommodate diverse approaches to lexicon organization and use. To this end, the  encoding of multilingual lexical information intended as a meta-entry that can serve as a standardized representational layer for multilingual lexical resources. MILE consists of an incremental definition of object-oriented layers for lexical description that will enable open and distributed lexicons, with elements possibly residing in different sites of the web. The defined lexical objects are intended for use by lexicon and application developers to build and target lexical data at high level of abstraction.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The Resource Definition Framework (RDF) and the Ontology Web Language (OWL) recently developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) build upon the XML web infrastructure to enable the creation of a Semantic Web, wherein web objects can be classified according to their properties, and the semantics of their relations (links) to other web objects can be precisely defined. This in turn will enable powerful inferencing capabilities that can adapt language processing applications to particular contexts.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The MILE lexical entry is an ideal structure for rendering via RDF/OWL. It consists of a hierarchy of lexical objects that are built up in a layered fashion by combining atomic data categories via clearly defined relations. The overall architecture is modular and layered, as described in Atkins et al.  (2002) and Calzolari et al. (2003). On the horizontal dimension, independent, linked modules target different dimensions of lexical entries. On the vertical dimension, the layered organization allows for varying degrees of granularity in lexical descriptions, allowing both &amp;quot;shallow&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;deep&amp;quot; lexical representations. RDF's class hierarchy mechanism, together with its capacity to specify named relations among objects in the various classes, provide a web-based means to represent this architecture.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3">  Furthermore, because RDF allows for instantiating objects in any defined class and subsequently referring to them as the target of appropriate relations, lexical objects at any level of specificity can be pre-defined. This provides an important mechanism for standardization of lexical elements, since these elements may be pre-defined, organized in class hierarchies with inherited properties, and used &amp;quot;off-the-shelf&amp;quot; as needed. In this paper we describe the overall model for MILE lexical entries and provide an instantiation of the model in RDF/OWL. This work has been done with an eye toward the goal of creating a web-based registry of lexical data categories and enabling the description of lexical information by establishing relations among them, and/or using pre-defined objects that may reside at various locations on the web. It is also assumed that using OWL specifications to enhance specifications of the ontology of lexical objects will eventually enable the exploitation of inferencing engines to retrieve and possibly create lexical information on the fly, as suited to particular contexts. As such, the model and RDF instantiation provided here are in line with the goals of ISO TC37 SC4, and should be fully mappable to the proposed pivot.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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