Crowdsourcing Ontology Lexicons

In order to make the growing amount of conceptual knowledge available through ontologies and datasets accessible to humans, NLP applications need access to information on how this knowledge can be verbalized in natural language. One way to provide this kind of information are ontology lexicons, which apart from the actual verbalizations in a given target language can provide further, rich linguistic information about them. Compiling such lexicons manually is a very time-consuming task and requires expertise both in Semantic Web technologies and lexicon engineering, as well as a very good knowledge of the target language at hand. In this paper we present an alternative approach to generating ontology lexicons by means of crowdsourcing: We use CrowdFlower to generate a small Japanese ontology lexicon for ten exemplary ontology elements from the DBpedia ontology according to a two-stage workflow, the main underlying idea of which is to turn the task of generating lexicon entries into a translation task; the starting point of this translation task is a manually created English lexicon for DBpedia. Comparison of the results to a manually created Japanese lexicon shows that the presented workflow is a viable option if an English seed lexicon is already available.