Language and domain aware lightweight ontology matching

Abstract

Concepts and relations in ontologies and in other knowledge organisation systems are usually annotated with natural language labels. Most ontology matchers rely on such labels in element-level matching techniques. State-of-the-art approaches, however, tend to make implicit assumptions about the language used in labels (usually English) and are either domain-agnostic or are built for a specific domain. When faced with labels in different languages, most approaches resort to general-purpose machine translation services to reduce the problem to monolingual English-only matching. We investigate a thoroughly different and highly extensible solution based on semantic matching where labels are parsed by multilingual natural language processing and then matched using language-independent and domain aware background knowledge acting as an interlingua. The method is implemented in NuSM, the language and domain aware evolution of the SMATCH semantic matcher, and is evaluated against a translation-based approach. We also design and evaluate a fusion matcher that combines the outputs of the two techniques in order to boost precision or recall beyond the results produced by either technique alone.