Lexical-semantic Mapping between Chinese and English Controlled Vocabularies in the Domain of Chinese Art

This study conducts a lexical-semantic mapping between the Chinese controlled vocabulary developed by the National Palace Museum (NPM-CV) in Taiwan and an English controlled vocabulary, the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) developed by the Getty Research Institute in the
U.S. that is primarily based on Western art. The research question is: In mapping a Chinese controlled vocabulary in Chinese art to a Western-centered art thesaurus, what types of relationships can be identified and what are the issues in mapping? The study’s main findings reveal that only one-third of the NPM-CV terms can be mapped as “exact equivalence” to AAT terms and three-fifths of the NPMCV
terms have hierarchical relationships (narrower to broader) with some AAT terms. Clearly, using AAT alone to index Chinese art collections will lead to insufficient indexing specificity. The study then proposes solutions to improve Chinese-English semantic interoperability for multilingual knowledge organization systems in the domain of Chinese art.