Towards a Linguistic Ontology with an Emphasis on Reasoning and Knowledge Reuse

The Dictionaries division at Oxford University Press (OUP) is aiming to model, integrate, and publish lexical content for 100 languages focussing on digitally under-represented languages. While there are multiple ontologies designed for linguistic resources, none had adequate features for meeting our requirements, chief of which was the capability to losslessly capture diverse features of many different languages in a dictionary format, while supplying a framework for inferring relations like translation, derivation, etc., between the data. Building on valuable features of existing models, and working with OUP monolingual and bilingual dictionary datasets, we have designed and implemented a new linguistic ontology. The ontology has been reviewed by a number of computational linguists, and we are working to move more dictionary data into it. We have also developed APIs to surface the linked data to dictionary websites.