An ontology-based approach in the literary research: two case-studies

The present paper suggests an application of ontologies in the analysis of a literary phenomenon. Starting from the needs of humanistic research and from the availibility on the Web of Language Resources, the adoption of such methodology, whose reference tool is an ontology, has led to a deeper analysis of the “Dualism Truth vs. Propaganda” in Karl Kraus’s writings and of the novel “Cloud, castle and lake” of Vladimir Nabokov. The aim of this paper is to put in evidence the role of ontologies in the literary research and text analysis as helping tools, able to make domain assumptions explicit. For this purpose, the two case-studies will show how the application of the WordNet ontology for word sense disambiguation can help the understanding of a literary phenomenon (in the first example) and the interpretation of the core of a novel (in the second example), thus facilitating the translation.