Arabic Language Alignment with English Ontologies: Some Ontological Reflections

摘要

There have been several attempts to build lexico-conceptual resources by extension of the English WordNet, i.e. by means of translation of English synsets. However, the extension approach is arguable because it assumes that the target resource is isomorphic to English WordNet. Yet, some languages, such as English and Arabic, can be very different. The problem would be to know, first, whether they conceptualize reality in the same way; and if not, to identify different concepts types. The mapping of a lexical resource of a different language onto Princeton WordNet of English (PWN) answers these questions. The experiment, in this article, describes results obtained from mapping the Arabic dictionary, al=qa?mu?s al=mu?i??, onto English WordNet and SUMO (Standard Upper Merged Ontology), also developed for the English language.