Language and Ontology (LangOnto2) & Terminology and Knowledge Structures (TermiKS)

This joint workshop brings together two different but closely related strands of research. On the one hand it looks at the overlap between ontologies and computational linguistics and on the other it explores the relationship between knowledge modelling and terminologies. In particular the workshop aims to create a forum for discussion in which the different relationships and commonalities between these two areas can be explored in detail, as well as presenting cutting edge research in each of the two individual areas. A significant amount of human knowledge can be found in texts. It is not surprising that languages such as OWL, which allow us to formally represent this knowledge, have become more and more popular both in linguistics and in automated language processing. For instance ontologies are now of core interest to many NLP fields including Machine Translation, Question Answering, Text Summarization, Information Retrieval, and Word Sense Disambiguation. At a more abstract level, however, ontologies can also help us to model and reason about phenomena in natural language semantics. In addition, ontologies and taxonomies can also be used in the organisation and formalisation of linguistically relevant categories such as those used in tagsets for corpus annotation. Notably also, the fact that formal ontologies are being increasingly accessed by users with limited to no background in formal logic has led to a growing interest in developing accessible front ends that allow for easy querying and summarisation of ontologies. It has also led to work in developing natural language interfaces for authoring ontologies and evaluating their design. Additionally in recent years there has been a renewed interest in the linguistic aspects of accessing, extracting, representing, modelling and transferring knowledge. Numerous tools for the automatic extraction of terms, term variants, knowledge-rich contexts, definitions, semantic relations and taxonomies from specialized corpora have been developed for a number of languages, and new theoretical approaches have emerged as potential frameworks for the study of specialized communication. However, the building of adequate knowledge models for practitioners (e.g. experts, researchers, translators, teachers etc.), on the one hand, and NLP applications (including cross-language, cross-domain, cross-device, multi-modal, multi-platform applications), on the other hand, still remains a challenge. The papers included in the workshop range across a wide variety of different areas and reflect the strong inter-disciplinary approach, which characterises both areas of research. In addition we are very happy to include two invited talks in the program presented by authorities in their respective fields: Pamela Faber from the field of terminology, and John McCrae, an expert on linguistic linked data and the interface between NLP and ontologies.