Toward a formal ontology for corpus linguistics

Ontologies have been among us for about 30 years, proving their importance in domains like medicine, biology, and law, to mention a few. They are studied in multiple scientific disciplines, including philosophy, computer science, information science, and even linguistics. In this paper, we present an initiative to build an ontology for corpus linguistics in the scope of the C-ORAL-BRASIL project. We first introduce the interdisciplinary nature of ontologies, asking what they are, both in linguistics and fields of artificial intelligence, like knowledge representation. Then, we explain the top and middle levels that integrate the initiative and present a fragment of the corpus linguistics ontology, focusing on more relevant classes. Definitions, labels and relationships of such fragments are presented in the appendix. The complete resulting ontology counts around 260 classes and 90 relationships distributed over three layers: domain, middle and top-level ontologies. Finally, we offer our final remarks about the experience.