ESSOT: an expert supporting system for ontology translation

Abstract

To enable knowledge access across languages, ontologies, mostly represented only in English, need to be translated into different languages. The main challenge in translating ontologies with machine translation is to disambiguate an ontology label with respect to the domain modelled by the ontology itself; however, a crucial requirement is to have translations validated by experts before the ontologies are deployed. Real-world applications have to implement a support system addressing this task to help experts in validating automatically generated translations. In this paper, we present ESSOT, an Expert Supporting System for Ontology Translation. The peculiarity of this system is to exploit the semantic information of the label’s context to improve the quality of label translations. The system has been tested within the Organic.Lingua project by translating the modelled ontology in three languages, whereby the results are compared with translations provided by the Microsoft Translator API. The provided results demonstrate the viability of our proposed approach.