Grammatical framework GF and owl

Question

I am interested in the filed on Computational Linguistics and NLP. I read a lot about Grammatical Framework (GF), which is divided into abstract syntax and concrete syntax. And I know a little bit about OWL, RDF and WordNet. I am confused about the differences between the 2 technologies.

1. Can we use GF rather than OWL as syntax builders?
2. Can we eliminate Parser by using GF?
3. Does GF contains all terms so we don't need to use WordNet?

Answer 1

One of the formal definitions of Grammatical Framework is:

Grammatical Framework (GF), grammaticalframework.org, is a multilingual grammar formalism based on the idea of a shared abstract syntax and mappings between the abstract syntax and concrete languages. GF has hundreds of users all over the world.

The way GF is connected to the Semantic Web is through lemon:

Lemon is a proposed model for modeling lexicon and machine-readable dictionaries and linked to the Semantic Web and the Linked Data cloud.It was designed to meet the following challenges:

• RDF-native form to enable leverage of existing Semantic Web technologies (SPARQL, OWL, RIF etc.).
  • Linguistically sound structure based on LMF to enable conversion to existing offline formats.
  • Separation of the lexicon and ontology layers, to ensure compatability with existing OWL models.
  • Linking to data categories, in order to allow for arbitrarily complex linguistic description.

So to answer your first question, GF and OWL complement each other. GF is essentially a set of grammatical rules that can be mapped between languages, but depending on the task at hand, you can use GF to develop powerful Semantic Web tools. For example, GF can be used to verbalise ontologies, as it has been demonstrated in lemon papers.

For the second question, yes. Since the intermediate level of GF is a set of logical rules, you don't need a parser anymore. The morphology and basic syntax mapping can be enough (again, what is your goal? As the definition says, GF covers basic syntax.)

As for WordNet:

WordNet® is a large lexical database of English. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. Synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations.

WordNet can be perceived as an ontology, but it is not. It cannot even be called a linguistic ontology. Having hypernym and hyponym relations does not make a dataset into an ontology.

What lemon or ontolex are trying to achieve is to create an ontology that can be used for linguistic purposes. This purpose could be annotation, corpus study, modelling dictionaries, and etc. However, the power of WordNet lies within its synsets (Words from the same lexical category that are roughly synonymous are grouped into synsets.); but the power of RDF/OWL lies within inference.