Current Projects and Activities:

• KYOTO:Knowledge Yielding Ontologies for Transition-based Organization (2008-2011)

  Coordinator of KYOTO : a 7th FrameWork project withing the area of Digital Libraries/Conceptual characterization of various genres in written and spoken media, across languages (IST-211423).

  The goal of KYOTO is to develop a content enabling system that provides deep semantic search and information access to large quantities of distributed multimedia data for both experts and the general public, covering a broad range of data from wide-spread sources in a number of culturally diverse languages. In this project we will target the languages: English, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Basque, Chinese and Japanese. This powerful system crucially rests on an ontology linked to wordnets—lexical semantic databases--in a variety of languages. Concept extraction and data mining are applied through a chain of semantic processors that re-use the knowledge for different languages and for particular domains. The shared ontology guarantees a uniform interpretation for diverse types of information from different sources and languages. The system can be maintained by field specialists using a Wiki platform. KYOTO is a generic system offering knowledge transition for any domain of knowledge and information, across different target groups in society and across linguistic, cultural and geographic borders. KYOTO will be applied to the environmental domain and span global information across European and non-European languages. For more information see:

  • Short description
  • EU-site on Kyoto

• DutchSemCor: A Dutch Corpus with Word Senses from the Cornetto Database

  Startsubsidie NWO Geesteswetenschappen, jan-aug. 2008. The startsubsidie will be used to prepare an NWO middel-groot investeringsproject to be submitted in September 2008. The goal of that final project is to deliver a corpus that is fully sense-tagged with senses, ontology tags, and domain tags from the Cornetto database. This corpus will play a key role in language technology research for Dutch and also in linguistic and cognitive research that relates linguistic form to meaning. Combining the best of both worlds, the corpus will be tagged using a combination of automatic techniques and manual editing. Automatic tagging techniques include on the one hand supervised methods, which can be trained on already tagged subcorpora as training data, enabling them to tag other subcorpora, and on the other hand unsupervised techniques that rely on other sources such as the Cornetto database itself. It is to be expected that the manual editing of the corpus will feed back in the form of adaptations to the semantic database Cornetto.

• FLaReNet

  Flarenet addresses the development and exploitation of Language Resources (LRs) and Language Technology (LT) that will enable easy and natural access to the wealth of information and knowledge encapsulated in (written, spoken, multimodal) digital documents. FLaReNet expectation is to achieve:
  • the largest network of LR and HLT players, ready to discuss information and knowledge on LRs and LT, and with appropriate mechanisms to share such information and disseminate it widely
    
  • an extended picture of LRs and a recasting of its definition in the light of recent scientific, methodological, technological, social developments
    
  • a consolidation of methods and approaches, common practices, frameworks and architectures
    
  • a roadmap identifying areas where consensus has been achieved or is emerging vs. areas where additional discussion and testing is required, together with an indication of priorities
    
  • a set of recommendations in the form of a plan of coherent actions for the EU and national organizations
    
  • a European model for the LRs of the next years.
    Bringing together the diverse approaches, efforts and technologies represented by its membership, FLaReNet will enable even greater progress toward community consensus.

• Global WordNet Grid (ongoing)

  In 2006 Vossen launched the Global Wordnet Grid: the building of a complete free worldwide wordnet grid. This grid will be build around a shared set of concepts, such as the Common Base Concepts used in many wordnet projects. These concepts will be expressed in terms of Wordnet synsets and SUMO definitions. People from all language communities are invited to upload synsets from their language to the Grid. Gradually, the Grid will then be represented by all languages. The Grid will be available to everybody and will be distributed completely free.

• Arabic WordNet (2005-2007)

  Constructing an Arabic Wordnet (AWN) in Parallel with an Ontology. This project aims at the development of wordnets for the Arabic languages and is sponsored by the American government and headed by Princeton University. Vossen will be responsible for the European development and coordination of building a lexical resource in Standard Arabic. AWN will be constructed according to the methods developed for EuroWordNet (EWN;Vossen 1998) and since applied to dozens of languages around the world. The EuroWordNet approach maximizes compatibility across wordnets and focuses on manual encoding of the most complicated and important concepts. Arabic WordNet will be mappable straightforwardly onto Princeton WordNet 2.0 and EuroWordNet, enabling translation on the lexical level to English and dozens of other languages. Several tools specific to this task will be developed. AWN will be a linguistic resource with a deep formal semantic foundation. Besides the standard wordnet representation of senses, word meanings are defined with a machine understandable semantics in first order logic. The basis for this semantics is the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) and its associated domain ontologies.

• Cornetto (2006-2008)

  "A Combinatoric and Relational Network for Language Technology": the extension of the Dutch wordnet with combinatoric and referential relations based on usage of words within domains. Cornetto is an initiative of Vossen and the Free University of Amsterdam to combine the Dutch wordnet and the Referentie Bestand Nederlands (a Dutch database with combinatoric information of Dutch word meanings) in a unique resource for Dutch. Cornetto will build a lexical semantic database for Dutch with rich vertical and horizontal semantic relations and combinatorial lexical constraints such as multiword expressions, idioms and collocations on the one hand, and lexical functions and frames on the other. The concepts will be aligned with the English Wordnet so that ontologies and domain labels can be imported. The semantic layer will be validated with a formal ontology, to make it usable in Semantic Web environments. Cornetto will cover 40K entries, including the most generic and central part of the language. The database will go beyond the structure and content of Wordnet and FrameNet.

• Global Wordnet Association (ongoing)

  Vossen is Founder and President of the Global WordNet Association. He founded GWA (with Christiane Fellbaum of Princeton University) in 2000 as a public and non-commercial organization that provides a platform for discussing, sharing and connecting wordnets for all languages in the world. For more information see:
  • Global Wordnet Association
  • Fourth Global WordNet Conference 2008 in Szeged, Hungary, 22-25 January, 2008
  • Third Global Wordnet Conference 2006 in Jeju Island. Korea, January 22-26, 2006
  • Information on the Second Global Wordnet Conference 2004 in Brno, Czech Republic, January 20-23, 2004
  • Information on the First Global Wordnet Conference 2002 in Mysore, India, January 21-25, 2002