Milena Slavcheva

Mapping a Lexical Semantic Resource to a Common Framework of Computational Lexicons

In recent years the proliferation of language resources has brought up the question of their interoperability, reuse and integration. Currently, it is appropriate not only to produce a language resource, but to connect it to prominent frameworks and global infrastructures. This paper presents the mapping of SemInVeSt – a knowledge base of the semantics of verb-centred structures in Bulgarian, French and Hungarian, to the Lexical Markup Framework (LMF) – an abstract metamodel, providing a common, standardized framework for the representation of computational lexicons. SemInVeSt and LMF share their underlying models, that is, both are based on the four-layer metamodel architecture of the Unified Modeling Language (UML). A two-step mapping of the SemInVeSt and LMF models is considered: the first step provides an LMF conformant schema of SemInVeSt as a multilingual lexical resource with a reference to an external system containing the semantic descriptors of the lexical units; the second step implies an LMF conformant representation of the semantic descriptors themselves, which are a product of the application of the Unified Eventity Representation (UER) – a cognitive theoretical approach to verb semantics and a graphical formalism, based on UML.

Semantic representation of events: building a semantic primes component

This paper describes a system of semantic primes necessary for the large-scale semantic representation of event types, encoded as verbal predicates The system of semantic primes is compiled via mapping modeling elements of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), the Semantic Minimum – Dictionary of Bulgarian (SMD), and the Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) The so developed system of semantic primes is a user-defined extension to the metalanguage, adopted in the Unified Eventity Representation (UER), a graphical formalism, introducing the object-oriented design to linguistic semantics.

The Challenge of Parallel Text Processing

The paper presents the technology of building a large German-French parallel corpus consisting of official documents of the European Union and Switzerland, and private and public organisations in France and Germany. The texts are morphosyntactically annotated, aligned at the sentence level and marked up in conformance with the TEI guidelines for standardised representation. The multilevel alignment method is applied; its precision is improved due to the correlation with the constraints of the classical alignment method of Gale and Church. The alignment information is encoded externally to the parallel text documents. The process of creating the corpus is an interesting algorithm of applying a number of software tools and adjusting intermediate production results.