A Cheap and Dirty Cross-Lingual Linking Service in the Cloud

In this paper, we describe the application of Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) technology for dynamic cross-lingual querying on demand. Whereas most related research is focusing on providing a static linking, i.e., cross-lingual inference, and then storing the resulting links, we demonstrate the application of the federation capabilities of SPARQL to perform lexical linking on the fly. In the end, we provide a baseline functionality that uses the connection of two web services – a SPARQL end point for multilingual lexical data and another SPARQL end point for querying an English language knowledge graph – in order to perform querying an English language knowledge graph using foreign language labels. We argue that, for low-resource languages where substantial native knowledge graphs are lacking, this functionality can be used to lower the language barrier by allowing to formulate cross-linguistically applicable queries mediated by a multilingual dictionary.