Ontologies for Crosslingual Applications

Human translation is based on linguistic and extralinguistic knowledge. Despite promising pioneering advances, knowledge-based machine translation has remained a tempting vision. The bottleneck has been the engineering of sufficiently comprehensive bodies of relevant knowledge.

The Semantic Web offers opportunities for the gradual evolution of a global heterogeneous knowledge base. The immediate target has been the modelling of certain knowledge domains by practical ontologies. In the talk we will demonstrate the utilization of ontological knowledge in different crosslingual applications reaching from crosslingual document retrieval via crosslingual question answering to complex information services involving several crosslingual functionalities, including machine translation.

We will then discuss the ramifications of this development and of the evolution of the World Wide Web for future directions in both statistical and rule-based machine translation.

-- CristinaVertan -- 30 Aug 2005