The Apertium Bilingual Dictionaries on the Web of Data
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Undefined 0 (0) 1 1 IOS Press The Apertium Bilingual Dictionaries on the Web of Data Jorge Gracia a;∗, Marta Villegas b, Asunción Gómez-Pérez a, and Núria Bel b, a Ontology Engineering Group, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid Campus de Montegancedo s/n Boadilla del Monte 28660 Madrid. Spain E-mail: {jgracia,asun}@fi.upm.es b Institut Universitari Linguistica Aplicada, Universitat Pompeu Fabra Roc Boronat, 138 08018 Barcelona. Spain E-mail: {marta.villegas,nuria.bel}@upf.edu Abstract. Bilingual electronic dictionaries contain collections of lexical entries in two languages, with explicitly declared trans- lation relations between such entries. Nevertheless, they are typically developed in isolation, in their own formats and accessible through proprietary APIs. In this paper we propose the use of Semantic Web techniques to make translations available on the Web to be consumed by other semantic enabled resources in a direct manner, based on standard languages and query means. In particular, we describe the conversion of the Apertium family of bilingual dictionaries and lexicons into RDF (Resource Descrip- tion Framework) and how their data have been made accessible on the Web as linked data. As result, all the converted dictionaries (many of them covering under-resourced languages) are connected among them and can be easily traversed from one to another to obtain, for instance, translations between language pairs not originally connected in any of the original dictionaries. Keywords: linguistic linked data, multilingualism, Apertium, bilingual dictionaries, lexicons, lemon, translation 1. Introduction In this article we will focus on the case of electronic bilingual dictionaries as a particular type of languages The publication of bilingual and multilingual lan- resources. Bilingual dictionaries are specialized dictio- guage resources as linked data (LD) on the Web can naries that describes translations of words or phrases largely benefit the creation of the critical mass of cross- from one language to another. They can be unidirec- lingual connections required by the vision of the mul- tional or bidirectional, allowing translation, in the lat- tilingual Web of Data [9]. The benefits of sharing lin- ter case, to and from both languages. A bilingual dic- guistic information on the Web of Data have been re- tionary can contain additional information such as part cently recognized by the language resources commu- of speech, gender, declination model and other gram- nity, which has shown increasing interest in publish- matical properties. ing their linguistic data and metadata as LD on the Electronic bilingual dictionaries have been typically Web [2]. As result of interlinking multilingual and developed in isolation, in their own formats and acces- open language resources, the Linguistic Linked Open sible through proprietary APIs. We propose the use of Data (LLOD) cloud is emerging1, that is, a new lin- Semantic Web techniques to make translations avail- guistic ecosystem based on the LD principles that will able on the Web to be consumed by other semantic allow the open exploitation of such data at global scale. enabled resources in a direct manner, based on stan- dard languages and query means. The result of a prin- cipled conversion into RDF is that the LD dictionar- *Corresponding author 1An updated picture of the current LLOD cloud can be found at ies are connected among them [7] and can be easily http://linguistic-lod.org/ traversed from one to another to obtain, for instance, 0000-0000/0-1900/$00.00 © 0 – IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved 2 J. Gracia et al. / The Apertium Bilingual Dictionaries on the Web of Data translations between language pairs not originally con- One of the modules is the lexical transfer module nected in any of the original dictionaries. Other po- which reads lexical forms of the source language tential uses of bilingual dictionaries in LD are to en- and delivers the corresponding target language lexical hance LD-based machine translation [10] and crosslin- forms. The module uses a bilingual dictionary which gual information access over LD [9]. contains an equivalent for each source lexical form. In particular, we have converted the Apertium fam- Apertium dictionaries are designed so that they can be ily of bilingual dictionaries [4] into RDF, making their compiled into letter transducers [6] which are able to data interconnected and accessible on the Web as LD. process input strings and produce output strings. Ac- Thus, the main contributions of this work are: cordingly, dictionaries are made of entries consisting of string pairs that correspond to the inputs and out- – We propose a method for converting bilingual puts of the transducer. The Apertium dictionaries are dictionaries into RDF and publish them as LD on described in XML. Notice that the Apertium initia- the Web, that we have particularised in the Aper- tive benefits under-resourced languages specially, for tium case. which it is difficult to apply Statistical Machine Trans- – As result, we have contributed to the cloud of lation techniques due to the lack of large parallel cor- LLOD with 22 new linguistic datasets, many of pora in such languages. them covering under-resourced languages that During the METANET4U Project3, a good num- had little or none presence so far in the Web ber of lexicons were converted into Lexical Markup of Data (e.g., Occitane, Asturian, Aragonese, Es- Framework [5] (LMF) in an effort to upgrade existing peranto, Basque, etc.). resources to agreed standards and guidelines. Many – We also analyse the resulting Apertium RDF Apertium lexicons were included in that process4. graph and exemplify how to traverse it to obtain Thus, following the LMF model, for each bilingual direct and indirect translations. Apertium lexicon a new LexicalResource was cre- – We have used and evaluated the one time inverse ated. Each LexicalResource contains two Lexicons consultation algorithm to compute the confidence (for source and target languages) and a set of SenseAxis degree of indirect translations. elements that are used to link senses in different lan- The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. guages. Only open categories were considered (nouns In Section 2 we briefly describe the Apertium ini- -including proper nouns-, verbs, adjectives and ad- tiative. Section 3 discusses how lexica and language verbs). The corresponding IDs were generated by con- translations can be represented as LD. Section 4 de- catenating the word form, the part of speech (PoS) tag scribes the method we have followed to convert the and the language tag. The following XML code exem- Apertium dictionaries into RDF and to publish them as plifies the LMF representation of a single translation LD on the Web. In Section 5 we exemplify how to tra- ("bench"@en ! "banco"@es): verse the Apertium RDF graph to obtain translations, <LexicalResource> and how to compute a confidence degree for indirect <Lexicon > translations. Section 6 analyses related work and, fi- <feat att="language" val="en"/> <LexicalEntry id="bench-n-en"> nally, conclusions can be found in Section 7. <feat att="partOfSpeech" val="n"/> <Lemma > <feat att="writtenForm" val="bench"/> </Lemma > 2. The source data <Sense id="bench_banco-n-l"/> </LexicalEntry> </Lexicon > Apertium is a free/open-source machine translation <Lexicon > platform [4], initially aimed at related-language pairs <feat att="language" val="es"/> which currently includes up to 40 language pairs2. The <LexicalEntry id="banco-n-es"> <feat att="partOfSpeech" val="n"/> system was released under the terms of the GNU Gen- <Lemma > <feat att="writtenForm" val="banco"/> eral Public License. </Lemma > The translation engine consists of series of assem- bled modules which communicate using text streams. 3http://www.meta-net.eu/projects/METANET4U/ 4A complete list of available lexicons can be found at http:// 2http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Main_Page lod.iula.upf.edu/types/Lexica/by/standards J. Gracia et al. / The Apertium Bilingual Dictionaries on the Web of Data 3 <Sense id="banco_bench-n-r"/> LexicalForm. A form represents a particular version </LexicalEntry> </Lexicon > of a lexical entry, for example a plural or some <SenseAxis id="bench_banco-n-banco_bench-n" other inflected form. senses ="bench_banco-n-l banco_bench-n-r"/> </LexicalResource> LexicalSense. The sense refers to the usage of a lex- ical entry with a specific meaning and can also be As it is shown in the above example, every resulting considered as a reification of the relation between a lexical entry and the ontological entity that char- LexicalEntry includes the lemma, the part of speech acterizes its meaning in a certain context. and a Sense element. Sense elements are needed as Reference. The reference is an entity in the ontology a place holder to encode translation equivalents in that defines the formal semantics associated to the the SenseAxis elements. Each LexicalEntry has as lexical entry. many senses as target equivalences. Sense elements only have an ID which is formed by concatenating the The lemon model did not consider the represen- source form, the target form, the PoS tag and the ‘l’ tation of explicit translations initially. To that end, or ‘r’ tags (which in the original dictionaries indicate an extension of lemon was proposed for represent- "left" and "right" respectively for the source and target ing translations on the Web of Data: the lemon trans- languages). Finally, the corresponding SenseAxis el- lation module [8]. The translation module consists ement is generated. Here the senses attribute collects essentially of two OWL classes: Translation and the related senses. TranslationSet. The latter is a set of translations sharing some common properties such as provenance, language pair, etc. Translation is a reification of the 3. The representation model relation between two lemon lexical senses that point to two lexical entries in two different languages, and has For representing lexical content in RDF, we adopt the following OWL properties: the LExicon Model for ONtologies (lemon) [12] as ba- translationSource translationTarget sis, which is a de facto standard for representing ontol- and .