Towards the Representation of Etymological Data on the Semantic Web

Abstract

In this article, we look at the potential for a wide-coverage modelling of etymological information as linked data using the Resource Data Framework (RDF) data model. We begin with a discussion of some of the most typical features of etymological data and the challenges that these might pose to an RDF-based modelling. We then propose a new vocabulary for representing etymological data, the Ontolex-lemon Etymological Extension (lemonETY), based on the ontolex-lemon model. Each of the main elements of our new model is motivated with reference to the preceding discussion.

LL(O)D and NLP perspectives on semantic change for humanities research

“…Work on the representation of etymologies in RDF includes de Melo's [38] work on Etymological WordNet, as well as Chiarcos et al's [30] definition of a minimal extension of the lemon model with two new properties cognate and the transitive derivedFrom for representing etymological relationships. Khan [91] defines an extension of OntoLex-Lemon that, like [26] attempts to facilitate a more detailed encoding of etymological information. Notably, this extension reifies the notion of etymology defining individuals of the Etymology class as containers for an ordered series of EtymologicalLink individuals.…”

“…Etymology modelling [30,38,90] Perdurantist modelling [189] OWL-based temporal reasoning [14] Resources General LL(O)D cloud [34] Linghub For diachronic analysis LiLa etymological lexicon [114] OWL-Time ontology [78]; LODE ontology; PeriodO gazetteer of periods Diachronic semantic lexicon of Dutch [41] Table 4 Main NLP methods for diachronic analysis surveyed in Section 5 NER, NED, NEL NER: rule-based [25,67,89]; unsupervised, statistical [172]; machine learning [3,111,130]; deep learning [79,105,146,163,167] Time-aware NED, NER [2,147] LL(O)D-based NEL [27,40,59,181] Word embeddings Unsupervised, with temporal-spatial information [64]; hyperbolic [16,131] LSTM-based [178]; detecting paradigmatic and syntagmatic shifts [188] Transformerbased BERT [42]; ELMo [137]; XLNet [193] Unsupervised, with contextualised word representations [62]; clustering [86] Topic modelling SCAN [58]; topics over time LDA [141] Hierarchical Dirichlet [36,106] LDA-based…”

When linguistics meets web technologies. Recent advances in modelling linguistic linked data

“…The former is described as representing "a collection of lexicographic entries[...]in accord with the lexicographic criteria followed in the development of that resource". 100 These lexicographic entries are represented in their turn by another new lexicog class, namely, the class Entry, which is defined as being a "structural element that represents a lexicographic article or record as it arranged in a source lexicographic resource" 101 (emphasis ours). An Entry furthermore is related to its source Lexicographic Resource via the object property entry.…”

“…112 The use of the lemon-tree model to publish the Thesaurus of Old English [162] reveals the flexibility of the OntoLex-Lemon/LLD approach in modelling more specialised kinds of linguistic information. As indeed does lemonEty [100] another 'unofficial' extension of the OntoLex-Lemon model, which has been proposed as a means of encoding etymological information contained both in lexica and dictionaries as well in other kinds of resources (such as articles or monographs). The lemonEty model does this by exploiting the graph-based structure of RDF data and by rendering explicit the status of etymologies as linguistic hypotheses.…”

Foreword to the Special Issue: “Towards the Multilingual Web of Data”

“…The challenges of the data representation and the publishing of the resource in a framework is explored and would be useful for those who need to publish dictionaries on the Web. In "Towards the Representation of Etymological Data on the Semantic Web" [4], Anas Fahad Khan proposes a new extension to the OntoLex-Lemon model for the representation of etymology information in the context of dictionaries. This new model considers the challenge of representing the different processes by which historic forms of words have developed and been borrowed into modern languages and the challenges in representing them.…”