Review of 'Ontology and the Lexicon: A Natural Language Processing Perspective', ed. Chu-Ren Huang, Nicoletta Calzolari, Aldo Gangemi, Alessandro Lenci, Alessandro Oltramari, and Laurent Prévot.

Abstract

The relationship between ontologies and natural language lexicons is a hotly debated one. An ontology is a formalized system of concepts (potentially of a specific domain) and the relations these concepts entertain. A lexicon, on the other hand, is the language component that contains the conventionalized knowledge of natural language speakers about lexical items (mostly words, but also morphemes and idioms). Ontologies ‘operate’ on the conceptual level, lexicons on the linguistic level. Ontologies systematize and relate concepts, lexicons systematize and relate words and other lexical items. However, as semantic relations between lexical items reflect meaning relatedness and meaning is essentially conceptual, both notions appear to be very close to one another (and are often wrongly used interchangeably). The interplay of and mapping between ontologies and lexical resources is therefore a vital and challenging field of research, one which has gained additional momentum and importance through the Semantic Web enterprise.

The volume under review is a collection of 17 papers addressing the ontology-lexicon interface from a Natural Language Processing (NLP) perspective. It is divided into four parts: (I) fundamental aspects, (II) discovery and representation of conceptual systems, (III) interfacing ontologies and lexical resources, and (IV) learning and using ontological knowledge. The editors are leading scholars in the field and have made a number of important contributions to the field themselves, some of which are described in the volume (editors are involved in authoring nearly half of the papers of the volume). The volume is aimed at being “an essential general reference book on the interface between ontology and lexical resources” (p. xvii). This aim is achieved, due to the spread of approaches, perspectives, and applications represented in the volume and due to the connecting and roadmap papers written by volume editors (Chapts. 1, 5, 10, and 14). The majority of the papers go back to the OntoLex workshop series and have been presented between 2002 and 2006 at those workshops. That is, more recent contributions are not included, even though, as the editors themselves state, there are “fast developments in this new research direction” (p. xvii). The volume displays a refreshing international view on the topic by containing a number of contributions on Asian languages.