MMoOn Core – the Multilingual Morpheme Ontology

Abstract

In the last years a rapid emergence of lexical resources has evolved in the Semantic Web. Whereas most of the linguistic information is already machine-readable, we found that morphological information is mostly absent or only contained in semi-structured strings. An integration of morphemic data has not yet been undertaken due to the lack of existing domain-specific ontologies and explicit morphemic data. In this paper, we present the Multilingual Morpheme Ontology called MMoOn Core which can be regarded as the first comprehensive ontology for the linguistic domain of morphological language data. It will be described how crucial concepts like morphs, morphemes, word forms and meanings are represented and interrelated and how language-specific morpheme inventories can be created as a new possibility of morphological datasets. The aim of the MMoOn Core ontology is to serve as a shared semantic model for linguists and NLP researchers alike to enable the creation, conversion, exchange, reuse and enrichment of morphological language data across different data-dependent language sciences. Therefore, various use cases are illustrated to draw attention to the cross-disciplinary potential which can be realized with the MMoOn Core ontology in the context of the existing Linguistic Linked Data research landscape.

Multilinguality and LLOD: A survey across linguistic description levels

“…Bulgarian, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, etc.) [213], Linking Latin project (LiLa) [195] in Latin, Framester data [99], OLiA annotation and linking models [54] (more than 75 language varieties) Syntax and morphology Ontolex-Synset module, OntoLex-Morph module, Multilingual Morpheme Ontology (MMoOn) [138,139] OLiA annotation and linking models [54] (more than 75 language varieties), Resource from Loughnane et al [155] in English and Spanish, Linking Latin project (LiLa) [195] in Latin, OdeNet in RDF in German [77] Pragmatics Pareja-Lora [194], OLiA Discourse Extensions [39], SemDok [8] Discourse marker annotations in Bulgarian, Lithuanian, German, European Portuguese, Hebrew, Romanian, Polish, and Macedonian, and English [215], Resource from [46] in 15 language varietes (e.g. English, German, Spanish, Arabic, etc) Lexicography Ontolex-Lexicog Apertium 22 bilingual lexicons in RDF [117] (eg.…”

“…Morphology still remains an under-explored aspect of LLOD. With the systematic review, we identified papers that address morphology in lexical resources [139,140,203], corpora [45,131,214] and in grammars [188] and as general modelling challenges [139,142].…”

“…OntoLex-Lemon extensions for morphology initially focused on inflectional morphology and composition with limited support for derivational morphology. The Multilingual Morpheme Ontology (MMoOn) [138,139] has been designed in a bottom-up approach to provide an exhaustive vocabulary for morphological inventories, partly inspired by current standards, tools and resources as applied in language documentation and linguistic typology. Its feature inventory incorporates a large number of terminological resources that are of considerable size in their own right (ISOcat, OLiA, LexInfo), which is why it has grown into a relatively large vocabulary.…”

“…These and other advantages illustrate the difference between traditional electronic dictionaries, compiled with only the human as target, and creating them for both humans and computers, as it is the case of linked data dictionaries. Some early works that used linked data to represent dictionary data comprise monolingual [141], bilingual [117], and multilingual [22] dictionaries, as well as diachronic [137], dialectal [79], and etymological ones [1].…”

The Correlation between Student’s Perception and Comprehension Achievement of the English Language Derivational Morphology

“…In the study of the word, sometimes it is confusing to distinguish the word and the morpheme because the two are alike (Klimek et al, 2020). By referring to simplex terminology, it is understood that the word morpheme is simplex, consisting of only one part with no affix added (Lane, Gutlohn, & van Dijk, 2019).…”