An ontological model for representing computational lexicons a componential based approach

In the last decades the computational linguistics community has developed important and widely used lexical resources. Although they are very popular among the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community, they do not address two important characteristics of language. The first is that the meaning of a word in a language is a collective effort defined by the people who use the language. The second is that language is a dynamic entity (some words change their meaning, others become obsolete, new words are born). A computational model which aims to represent this real world entity should be structured in a way that allows for expansion, facilitates collaboration, and provides transparent meaning representation. This paper addresses these two issues and provides a solution based on Semantic Web technologies. The solution is based on an ontological model for representing computational lexicons using the field theory of semantics and componential analysis. The model has been implemented on the “Time” semantic field vocabulary of the Arabic language and the results of a preliminary evaluation are presented.