Typeful Ontologies with Direct Multilingual Verbalization

Paper in proceeding, 2012

We have developed a methodology for the representation of ontologies in a strictly typed language with dependent types. The methodology is supported by an experiment where we translated SUMO (Suggested Upper-Merged Ontology) to GF (Grammatical Framework). The representation of SUMO in GF preserves the expressivity of the original ontology, adding to this the advantages of a type system and built-in support for natural language generation. SUMO is the largest open-source ontology describing over 10,000 concepts and the relations between them, along with a number of first-order axioms, which are further on used in performing automated reasoning on the ontology. GF is a type-theoretical grammar formalism mainly used for natural language applications. Through the logical framework that it incorporates, GF allows a consistent ontology representation, and thanks to its grammatical features the ontology is directly verbalized in a number of controlled natural languages.