Unifying morphology resources with OntoLex-Morph: a case study in German

The OntoLex vocabulary has become a widely used community standard for machine-readable lexical resources on the web. The primary motivation to use OntoLex in favor of tool- or application-specific formalisms is to facilitate interoperability and information integration across different resources. One of its extension that is currently being developed is a module for representing morphology, OntoLex-Morph. In this paper, we show how OntoLex-Morph can be used for the encoding and integration of different types of morphological resources on a unified basis. With German as the example, we demonstrate it for (a) a full-form dictionary with inflection information (Unimorph), (b) a dictionary of base forms and their derivations (UDer), (c) a dictionary of compounds (from GermaNet), and (d) lexicon and inflection rules of a finite-state parser/generator (SMOR/Morphisto). These data are converted to OntoLex-Morph, their linguistic information is consolidated and corresponding lexical entries are linked with each other. The main contribution of this paper is the discussion of the current state of OntoLex-Morph and its validation on different types of real-world resources for a single language. In the longer term, the successful application of OntoLex-Morph to such diverse data, along with the adjustments to the vocabulary observed in the process, will be a means to establish interoperability among morphological resources as well as between them and classical lexical data such as dictionaries, WordNets, or thesauri