Experimental Studies for Revealing Key Factors of Cross-Language Alignments

Cross-language alignment between ontologies is relevant for the interoperability of systems in specific domains, such as in the life science domain. Although the literature has proposed techniques for the alignment of ontologies described in different languages, the influence of linguistic characteristics from domain-specific ontologies on such alignments has barely been appraised. This study proposes a series of experiments based on real-world mappings to understand the matching between ontologies in different languages. It investigates the role of a pivot-language related to the domain for the purpose of a fully automatic cross-language alignment. In particular, we analyse the influence of syntactic and semantic similarity methods and the structure of terms denoting concepts in ontologies. Experimental results, focused on the life science domain, indicate useful factors to take into account in the design of matching algorithms for domain-specific cross-language alignment.