Onto.PT: Towards the Automatic Construction of a Lexical Ontology ...

Preface
About six years ago, almost by accident, I ended up engaging in an academic research
career. It all started with my Master’s dissertation, the final, and probably the most
important, stage of my Master’s degree. Then, I was not planning to dedicate more
than one year of my life to research. But even one year later, when I started working
as a researcher for Linguateca, it was far from my thoughts that I would soon enroll
on a PhD.
Briefly, the main goal of my Master’s work was to, given a rhythmic sequence,
generate matching lyrics, in Portuguese. My intention was always to work with my
mother tongue – not only because I felt that the results would be more understandable
and funnier for the people surrounding me, but also because I used to write a
few Portuguese lyrics for my former band. I was thus very interested in investigating
how far an automatic lyricist could go.
However, working with Portuguese revealed to be a challenging task. Since the
beginning of the work, we noticed that there was a lack of language resources for
Portuguese and it was not easy to find the few existing ones. For instance, at
that time, we could not find a public comprehensive lexicon for providing words
and information on their morphology and possible inflections. Not to mention a
semantics-oriented lexicon. Since then, I decided I wanted to contribute with something
useful, that would hopefully fulfill the aforementioned shortage of resources.
More or less at the same time, I had my first contact with Linguateca, a distributed
language resource centre for Portuguese, responsible not only for cataloguing existing
resources, but also for developing and providing free access to them.
I was very lucky that, before the end of my Master’s, Linguateca opened a position
that I applied for. The main goal of this position was to develop PAPEL,
a lexical-semantic resource for Portuguese, automatically extracted from a dictionary.
After my Master’s, I was hired for that precise task. While working for
Linguateca, I started to have a deeper contact with other researchers working on
the computational processing of Portuguese. I started to gain some experience on
natural language processing (NLP), especially on semantic information extraction,
and I became passionate for research in this area. So much that, today, I do not see
myself doing something completely unrelated.
The work with Linguateca was very important for my training as a researcher
in NLP. It was so enriching that I felt that, with what I had learned, I could do,
and learn, more. And there is so much to do to contribute to the development of
Portuguese NLP, that I wanted to continue my work, which I did, after embarking
on my PhD. This thesis presents the result of a four year PhD where, starting with
what we learned with PAPEL, we created a larger resource, Onto.PT, by exploiting
other sources, and we developed a model for organising this resource in an alternative
way, which might suit better concept-oriented NLP.