Sinica BOW: integrating bilingual WordNet and SUMO ontology

The sinica BOW (academia sinica bilingual ontological WordNet) is intended as a linguistic infrastructure for knowledge representation and knowledge engineering. It is built upon the relation-based structure of WordNet. On one hand, a bilingual WordNet is constructed with the crucial design feature of treating bilingual translation correspondences as lexical semantic relations. On the other hand, SUMO (suggested upper merged ontology) is adopted as the shared system of conceptual categorization. SUMO is also one of the first conceptual categorization systems to be mapped to an English lexicon. By the combination of ontology and WordNet, we hope that sinica BOW will 1) give each linguistic form a rigorous conceptual location, 2) clarify the relation between conceptual classification and linguistic instantiation, and 3) facilitate genuine cross-lingual access of knowledge. In addition to the integration of WordNet and ontology, it is also an important goal of sinica BOW to integrate lexical resources such that the linguistic-to-conceptual representation and language -to- language gaps can be bridged simultaneously. Taking lexicon as a bridging knowledgebase and ontology as the overall knowledge structure seems to be a logical choice. Integrating the two resources with multilingual capacity will add to the versatility and open new possibilities.