Countering language attrition with PanLex and theWeb of Data.

The world is losing some of its 7,000 languages. Hypothesizing that language attrition might subside if all languages were intertranslatable, the PanLex project supports panlingual lexical translation by integrating all known lexical translations. Semantic Web technologies can flexibly represent and reason with the content of its database and interlink it with linguistic and other resources and annotations. Conversely, PanLex, with its collection of translation links between more than a billion pairs of lexemes from more than 9,000 language varieties, can improve the coverage of the Linguistic Web of Data. We detail how we transformed the content of the PanLex database to RDF, established conformance with the lemon and GOLD data models, interlinked it with Lexvo and DBpedia, and published it as Linked Data and via SPARQL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]