Developing the Semantic Web via the Resolution of Meaning Ambiguities

The paper presents an interdisciplinary project in cognitive linguistics, computer science, and mathematical logic, aimed at the development of a theoretical framework and correspondent logical tools for the treatment, in the Semantic Web context, of some typical linguistic phenomena in natural languages, such as lexical ambiguities and figures of speech. In particular, we focus on some specific features of metaphor that need to be addressed in order to enhance the overall quality of knowledge representation in the Semantic Web. To this extent, we briefly present PROL (Parametric Relational Ontology Language) as a novel ontological approach to the representation of the whole semantic content of n-ary relations usually expressed in natural language. Lastly, we show how specific instances of metaphorical expressions can be represented and dealt with via PROL.