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Formal Description of Resources for Ontology-based Semantic Annotation

Ontology-based semantic annotation aims at putting fragments of a text in correspondence with proper elements of an ontology such that the formal semantics encoded by the ontology can be exploited to represent text interpretation. In this paper, we formalize a resource for this goal. The main difficulty in achieving good semantic annotations consists in identifying fragments to be annotated and labels to be associated with them. To this end, our approach takes advantage of standard web ontology languages as well as rich linguistic annotation platforms. This in turn is concerned with how to formalize the combination of the ontological and linguistical information, which is a topical issue that has got an increasing discussion recently. Different from existing formalizations, our purpose is to extend ontologies by semantic annotation rules whose complexity increases along two dimensions: the linguistic complexity and the rule syntactic complexity. This solution allows reusing best NLP tools for the production of various levels of linguistic annotations. It also has the merit to distinguish clearly the process of linguistic analysis and the ontological interpretation.