AN ONTOLOGY FOR A WEB DICTIONARY OF ITALIAN SIGN LANGUAGE

Rosella Gennari, Tania di Mascio

2007

Abstract

Sign languages are visual languages used in deaf communities. They are essentially tempo-spatial languages: signs are made of manual components, e.g., the hand movements, and non-manual components, e.g., facial expressions. The e-LIS project aims at the creation of the first web bidirectional dictionary for Italian sign language–verbal Italian. Whereas the lexicographic order is a standard and ‘natural’ way of ordering hence retrieving words in Italian dictionaries, there is nothing similar for Italian sign language dictionaries. Stokoe-based notations have been successfully employed for decomposing and ordering signs in paper dictionaries for Italian sign language; but consulting the dictionaries requires knowing the adopted Stokoe-based notation, which is not as easy-to-remember and well-known as Italian alphabet is. Users of a web dictionary cannot be expected to be expert of this. There the role of ontologies comes into play. The ontology presented in this paper analyses and relates the formational components of a sign; in some sense, the ontology allows us to ‘enrich’ the e-LIS dictionary with expert information concerning classes of sign components and, above all, their mutual relations. We conclude this paper with several open questions at the intersection of knowledge representation and reasoning, semantic web, sign and computational linguistics.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Gennari R. and di Mascio T. (2007). AN ONTOLOGY FOR A WEB DICTIONARY OF ITALIAN SIGN LANGUAGE . In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 2: WEBIST, ISBN 978-972-8865-78-8, pages 206-213. DOI: 10.5220/0001276302060213

in Bibtex Style

@conference{webist07,
author={Rosella Gennari and Tania di Mascio},
title={AN ONTOLOGY FOR A WEB DICTIONARY OF ITALIAN SIGN LANGUAGE},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 2: WEBIST,},
year={2007},
pages={206-213},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0001276302060213},
isbn={978-972-8865-78-8},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 2: WEBIST,
TI - AN ONTOLOGY FOR A WEB DICTIONARY OF ITALIAN SIGN LANGUAGE
SN - 978-972-8865-78-8
AU - Gennari R.
AU - di Mascio T.
PY - 2007
SP - 206
EP - 213
DO - 10.5220/0001276302060213