OWL/DL formalization of the MULTEXT-East morphosyntactic specifications

This paper describes the modeling of the morphosyntactic annotations of the MULTEXT-East corpora and lexicons as an OWL/DL ontology. Formalizing annotation schemes in OWL/DL has the advantages of enabling formally specifying interrelationships between the various features and making logical inferences based on the relationships between them. We show that this approach provides us with a top-down perspective on a large set of morphosyntactic specifications for multiple languages, and that this perspective helps to identify and to resolve conceptual problems in the original specifications. Furthermore, the ontological modeling allows us to link the MULTEXT-East specifications with repositories of annotation terminology such as the General Ontology of Linguistics Descriptions or the ISO TC37/SC4 Data Category Registry.