Panel Discussion 

Cross-Language Mapping Semantics

Saturday, 25 January 16:30-18:00

Motivation

In the last decade, constructing ontology-based linguistic resources (e.g., linguistic ontologies and wordnets) have gained a great attention in research as well as in industry for enabling multilingual Web interoperability. Typically, the creation of wordnets, as well as the creation of most ontologies is carried out manually and requires significant human efforts. Thereby, automating this process is a challenging task.

To enable intelligent agents and applications to access and interpret the multilingual Web information automatically, we not only need to overcome the language barrier as well as resolve socio-cultural differences. The latter is particularly important for the mapping of conceptually equivalent information represented in different natural languages.

Three real-life cases will be presented. Each will discuss a different experience in mappings Wordnets across different languages. In the subsequent panel discussion, each panelist will present his/her experience and opinion about the specific issues listed below. Finally, the audience will be encouraged to offer their comments and suggestions, and to ask questions about the issues that were discussed by the panelists.

• (How) Can Machine Translation support mapping between different wordnets?
• Which challenges do people face in using the GWN's Inter-Lingual Index to map between wordnets?
• Are top-level ontologies useful, and how can top-level ontologies be used in mapping between wordnets?
• Is it useful and practical to annotate mappings with a weight/rank?
• (How) Can we infer hypernym and meronym relations based on existing equivalence mapping across different languages?
• How to evaluate cross-language mappings?
• Can the classification-based interpretation fit the cross-language mapping semantics?
• Can concepts be 100% language-independent, or are they necessarily influenced by the culture of the speakers?
• How can we find the common concepts across the different languages?

Program

16:30-16:35	Opening
16:35-17:00	Real-Life Cases Cross-lingual mapping - the case of the African Wordnet, Sonja Bosch, University of South Africa, Pretoria. Challenges in linking Indian language Wordnets. Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Challenges in mapping between Asian Languages. Hitoshi Isahara, Toyohashi University of Technology.
17:00-17:50	Panel Discussion Panel Moderator Mustafa Jarrar, Birziet University. Panelists Francis Bond, Nanyang Technological University. German Rigau, University of the Basque Country. John P. McCrae, University of Bielefeld. Christiane Fellbaum, Princeton University. Piek Vossen, VU University Amsterdam.
17:50-18:00	Closing

Panel Organizers

• Mustafa Jarrar, Birzeit University.
• Matteo Palmonari, University of Milano Bicocca.
• Christiane Fellbaum, Princeton University.
• Mamoun Abu Helou, University of Milano Bicocca and Birzeit University.

About SIERA Project

SIERA is an EU-FP7 funded project (http://sina.birzeit.edu/SIERA/) that aims to reinforce closer scientific cooperation between Palestinian institutions (Sina Institute at Birzeit University) and EU institutions in the field of multilingual and multicultural knowledge sharing technologies. One of SIERA's core activities is to develop a formal framework for mapping between the Arabic Ontology and WordNet.

This panel is sponsored by the SIERA project (EU-FP7 No. 295006)