How to represent meanings in an ontology

Abstract

We work on a method for giving a formal semantic representation of natural language texts. The semantic representation is generated in an ontology, on the basis of morphological and syntactic information. The task of the semantic analysis is to create instances in the ontology that contains the world model, i.e. to create those individuals and relations that correspond to the situation described by the text. The knowledge base of the semantic analyser is stored in an OWL ontology. This paper gives an overview of the system, and we discuss those questions of ontology design that require special attention in the context of meaning representation. We also present a software prototype that is based on the method and generates electronic medical records from free-form medical texts.