SUMO: a sharable knowledge resource with linguistic inter-operability

Summary form only given. The suggested upper merged ontology (SUMO) is a large, free, upper ontology in first order logic. It is increasingly being used as a resource in natural language understanding research. SUMO has been used as the basis for an interchange language for morphosyntactics, to resolve the meaning of terms in Web search, to express the deep semantics of restricted natural language sentences, and as a repository of pragmatics and world knowledge to support question answering. SUMO contains roughly 1000 terms and 4000 axioms including 750 rules. There are domain ontologies which extend SUMO and together total 20,000 terms and 60,000 axioms, making this the largest freely available formal ontology. SUMO has been mapped by hand to all 100,000 synsets in WordNet 1.6. This can support software which converts English words to formal terms, thereby allowing the application of formal axioms to aid in sense disambiguation, or interpretation of meaning.