Ontology Based Qualitative Methodology for Chinese Language Analysis

With its rich history and the rapid economic development in China, Chinese has becoming a language drawing an increased research interest in different domains. The big difference between Chinese and other languages (mainly the European languages) leads to new challenges regarding existing methodologies. In this paper, we propose an ontology-based qualitative methodology for analyzing the Chinese language, aiming to construct machine readable knowledge from original texts, carrying out mining and reasoning on the data, and providing meaningful inference results. Our approach is exploiting characteristics of the language, which allow us to extract certain elements which are fed to the analytical process. A software prototype has been implemented. Experimental cases are presented and they indicate that the approach can produce reasonable results.