Prolexbase: An Ontology for the Multilingual Treatment of Proper Names

Proper names often constitute a problem in translation. This contribution deals with an ontology which represents the basis for a multilingual database of proper names, Prolexbase. It is being set up for treatment of proper names in the framework of the Prolex project, a research programme supported by the French Ministry of Industry in collaboration with two firms working on the market of language technologies: Systran & Exalead. The aim of this collaboration is to create a multilingual database of proper names containing information applicable to machine translation, computer aided translation, data research as well as spelling dictionaries. These particular aims guided the creation of the ontology whose description will follow. Besides a set of language-dependent & language-independent relations associated with a logical model, the database is founded on a four-level ontology: the level of instances (the proper names such as they appear in a written text in a specific language), the linguistic level (the level of so-called "prolexemes"), the conceptual level (the numerical pivots) as well as the metaconceptual level (types & supertypes). We will describe here the different levels of the ontology & their implementation in the database using French & German examples. 5 Figures, 28 References. Adapted from the source document