Global WordNet Conference (2018)


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Proceedings of the 9th Global Wordnet Conference

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Proceedings of the 9th Global Wordnet Conference
Francis Bond | Piek Vossen | Christiane Fellbaum

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BanglaNet: Towards a WordNet for Bengali Language
K.M. Tahsin Hassan Rahit | Khandaker Tabin Hasan | Md. Al- Amin | Zahiduddin Ahmed

Despite being a popular language in the world, the Bengali language lacks in having a good wordnet. This restricts us to do NLP related research work in Bengali. Most of the today’s wordnets are developed by following expand approach. One of the key challenges of this approach is the cross-lingual word-sense disambiguation. In our research work, we make semantic relation between Bengali wordnet and Princeton WordNet based on well-established research work in other languages. The algorithm will derive relations between concepts as well. One of our key objectives is to provide a panel for lexicographers so that they can validate and contribute to the wordnet.

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WME 3.0: An Enhanced and Validated Lexicon of Medical Concepts
Anupam Mondal | Dipankar Das | Erik Cambria | Sivaji Bandyopadhyay

Information extraction in the medical domain is laborious and time-consuming due to the insufficient number of domain-specific lexicons and lack of involvement of domain experts such as doctors and medical practitioners. Thus, in the present work, we are motivated to design a new lexicon, WME 3.0 (WordNet of Medical Events), which contains over 10,000 medical concepts along with their part of speech, gloss (descriptive explanations), polarity score, sentiment, similar sentiment words, category, affinity score and gravity score features. In addition, the manual annotators help to validate the overall as well as individual category level of medical concepts of WME 3.0 using Cohen’s Kappa agreement metric. The agreement score indicates almost correct identification of medical concepts and their assigned features in WME 3.0.

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Using Context to Improve the Spanish WordNet Translation
Alfonso Methol | Guillermo López | Juan Álvarez | Luis Chiruzzo | Dina Wonsever

We present some strategies for improving the Spanish version of WordNet, part of the MCR, selecting new lemmas for the Spanish synsets by translating the lemmas of the corresponding English synsets. We used four simple selectors that resulted in a considerable improvement of the Spanish WordNet coverage, but with relatively lower precision, then we defined two context based selectors that improved the precision of the translations.

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Towards Cross-checking WordNet and SUMO Using Meronymy
Javier Álvez | German Rigau

We describe the practical application of a black-box testing methodology for the validation of the knowledge encoded in WordNet, SUMO and their mapping by using automated theorem provers. In this paper,weconcentrateonthepart-whole information provided by WordNet and create a large set of tests on the basis of few question patterns. From our preliminary evaluation results, we report on some of the detected inconsistencies.

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Comparing Two Thesaurus Representations for Russian
Natalia Loukachevitch | German Lashevich | Boris Dobrov

In the paper we presented a new Russian wordnet, RuWordNet, which was semi-automatically obtained by transformation of the existing Russian thesaurus RuThes. At the first step, the basic structure of wordnets was reproduced: synsets’ hierarchy for each part of speech and the basic set of relations between synsets (hyponym-hypernym, part-whole, antonyms). At the second stage, we added causation, entailment and domain relations between synsets. Also derivation relations were established for single words and the component structure for phrases included in RuWordNet. The described procedure of transformation highlights the specific features of each type of thesaurus representations.

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Towards Mapping Thesauri onto plWordNet
Marek Maziarz | Maciej Piasecki

plWordNet, the wordnet of Polish, has become a very comprehensive description of the Polish lexical system. This paper presents a plan of its semi-automated integration with thesauri, terminological databases and ontologies, as a further necessary step in its development. This will improve linking of plWordNet into Linked Open Data, and facilitate applications in, e.g., WSD, keyword extraction or automated metadata generation. We present an overview of resources relevant to Polish and a plan for their linking to plWordNet.

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Investigating English Affixes and their Productivity with Princeton WordNet
Verginica Mititelu

Such a rich language resource like Princeton WordNet, containing linguistic information of different types (semantic, lexical, syntactic, derivational, dialectal, etc.), is a thesaurus which is worth both being used in various language-enabled applications and being explored in order to study a language. In this paper we show how we used Princeton WordNet version 3.0 to study the English affixes. We extracted pairs of base-derived words and identified the affixes by means of which the derived words were created from their bases. We distinguished among four types of derivation depending on the type of overlapping between the senses of the base word and those of the derived word that are linked by derivational relations in Princeton WordNet. We studied the behaviour of affixes with respect to these derivation types. Drawing on these data, we inferred about their productivity.

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Mapping WordNet Instances to Wikipedia
John P. McCrae

Lexical resource differ from encyclopaedic resources and represent two distinct types of resource covering general language and named entities respectively. However, many lexical resources, including Princeton WordNet, contain many proper nouns, referring to named entities in the world yet it is not possible or desirable for a lexical resource to cover all named entities that may reasonably occur in a text. In this paper, we propose that instead of including synsets for instance concepts PWN should instead provide links to Wikipedia articles describing the concept. In order to enable this we have created a gold-quality mapping between all of the 7,742 instances in PWN and Wikipedia (where such a mapping is possible). As such, this resource aims to provide a gold standard for link discovery, while also allowing PWN to distinguish itself from other resources such as DBpedia or BabelNet. Moreover, this linking connects PWN to the Linguistic Linked Open Data cloud, thus creating a richer, more usable resource for natural language processing.

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Mapping WordNet Concepts with CPA Ontology
Svetla Koeva | Cvetana Dimitrova | Valentina Stefanova | Dimitar Hristov

The paper discusses the enrichment of WordNet data through merging of WordNet concepts and Corpus Pattern Analysis (CPA) semantic types. The 253 CPA semantic types are mapped to the respective WordNet concepts. As a result of mapping, the hyponyms of a synset to which a CPA semantic type is mapped inherit not only the respective WordNet semantic primitive but also the CPA semantic type.

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Improving Wordnets for Under-Resourced Languages Using Machine Translation
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Mihael Arcan | John P. McCrae

Wordnets are extensively used in natural language processing, but the current approaches for manually building a wordnet from scratch involves large research groups for a long period of time, which are typically not available for under-resourced languages. Even if wordnet-like resources are available for under-resourced languages, they are often not easily accessible, which can alter the results of applications using these resources. Our proposed method presents an expand approach for improving and generating wordnets with the help of machine translation. We apply our methods to improve and extend wordnets for the Dravidian languages, i.e., Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, which are severly under-resourced languages. We report evaluation results of the generated wordnet senses in term of precision for these languages. In addition to that, we carried out a manual evaluation of the translations for the Tamil language, where we demonstrate that our approach can aid in improving wordnet resources for under-resourced Dravidian languages.

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Semantic Feature Structure Extraction From Documents Based on Extended Lexical Chains
Terry Ruas | William Grosky

The meaning of a sentence in a document is more easily determined if its constituent words exhibit cohesion with respect to their individual semantics. This paper explores the degree of cohesion among a document’s words using lexical chains as a semantic representation of its meaning. Using a combination of diverse types of lexical chains, we develop a text document representation that can be used for semantic document retrieval. For our approach, we develop two kinds of lexical chains: (i) a multilevel flexible chain representation of the extracted semantic values, which is used to construct a fixed segmentation of these chains and constituent words in the text; and (ii) a fixed lexical chain obtained directly from the initial semantic representation from a document. The extraction and processing of concepts is performed using WordNet as a lexical database. The segmentation then uses these lexical chains to model the dispersion of concepts in the document. Representing each document as a high-dimensional vector, we use spherical k-means clustering to demonstrate that our approach performs better than previous techniques.

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Toward a Semantic Concordancer
Adam Pease | Andrew Cheung

Concordancers are an accepted and valuable part of the tool set of linguists and lexicographers. They allow the user to see the context of use of a word or phrase in a corpus. A large enough corpus, such as the Corpus Of Contemporary American English, provides the data needed to enumerate all common uses or meanings. One challenge is that there may be too many results for short search phrases or common words when only a specific context is desired. However, finding meaningful groupings of usage may be impractical if it entails enumerating long lists of possible values, such as city names. If a tool existed that could create some semantic abstractions, it would free the lexicographer from the need to resort to customized development of analysis software. To address this need, we have developed a Semantic Concordancer that uses dependency parsing and the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) to support linguistic analysis at a level of semantic abstraction above the original textual elements. We show how this facility can be employed to analyze the use of English prepositions by non-native speakers. We briefly introduce condordancers and then describe the corpora on which we applied this work. Next we provide a detailed description of the NLP pipeline followed by how this captures detailed semantics. We show how the semantics can be used to analyze errors in the use of English prepositions by non-native speakers of English. Then we provide a description of a tool that allows users to build semantic search specifications from a set of English examples and how those results can be employed to build rules that translate sentences into logical forms. Finally, we summarize our conclusions and mention future work.

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Using OpenWordnet-PT for Question Answering on Legal Domain
Pedro Delfino | Bruno Cuconato | Guilherme Paulino-Passos | Gerson Zaverucha | Alexandre Rademaker

In order to practice a legal profession in Brazil, law graduates must be approved in the OAB national unified bar exam. For their topic coverage and national reach, the OAB exams provide an excellent benchmark for the performance of legal information systems, as it provides objective metrics and are challenging even for humans, as only 20% of its candidates are approved. After constructing a new data set on the exams and doing shallow experiments on it, we now employ the OpenWordnet-PT to verify whether using word senses and relations we can improve previous results. We discuss the results, possible future ideas and the additions to the OpenWordnet-PT that we made.

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Implementation of the Verb Model in plWordNet 4.0
Agnieszka Dziob | Maciej Piasecki

The paper presents an expansion of the verb model for plWordNet – the wordnet of Polish. A modified system of constitutive features (register, aspect and verb classes), synset and lexical relations is presented. A special attention is given to the proposed new relations and changes in the verb classification. We discuss also the results of its verification by application to the description of a relatively large sample of Polish verbs. The model introduces a new class of relations, namely non-constitutive synset relations that are shared among lexical units, but describe, not define synsets. The proposed model is compared to the entailment relations in other wordnets, and the description of verbs based on valency frames.

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Public Apologies in India - Semantics, Sentiment and Emotion
Sangeeta Shukla | Rajita Shukla

This paper reports a pilot study related to public apologies in India, with reference to certain keywords found in them. The study is of importance as the choice of lexical items holds importance which goes beyond the surface meaning of the words. The analysis of the lexical items has been done using interlinked digital lexical resources which, in future, can lend this study to computational tasks related to opinion mining, sentiment analysis and document classification. The study attempts an in-depth psycholinguistic analysis of whether the apology conveys a sincerity of intent or is it a mere ritualistic exercise to control and repair damage.

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Derivational Relations in Arabic WordNet
Mohamed Ali Batita | Mounir Zrigui

When derivational relations deficiency exists in a wordnet, such as the Arabic WordNet, it makes it very difficult to exploit in the natural language processing community. Such deficiency is raised when many wordnets follow the same development path of Princeton WordNet. A rule-based approach for Arabic derivational relations is proposed in this paper to deal with this deficiency. The proposed approach is explained step by step. It involves the gathering of lexical entries that share the same root, into a bag of words. Rules are then used to affect the appropriate derivational relations, i.e. to relate existing words in the AWN, involving part-of-speech switch. The method is implemented using Java. Manual verification by a lexicographer takes place to ensure good results. The described approach gave good results. It could be useful for other morphologically complex languages as well.

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Extending Wordnet to Geological Times
Henrique Muniz | Fabricio Chalub | Alexandre Rademaker | Valeria De Paiva

This paper describes work extending Princeton WordNet to the domain of geological texts, associated with the time periods of the geological eras of the Earth History. We intend this extension to be considered as an example for any other domain extension that we might want to pursue. To provide this extension, we first produce a textual version of Princeton WordNet. Then we map a fragment of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) ontologies to WordNet and create the appropriate new synsets. We check the extended ontology on a small corpus of sentences from Gas and Oil technical reports and realize that more work needs to be done, as we need new words, new senses and new compounds in our extended WordNet.

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Towards Emotive Annotation in plWordNet 4.0
Monika Zaśko-Zielińska | Maciej Piasecki

The paper presents an approach to building a very large emotive lexicon for Polish based on plWordNet. An expanded annotation model is discussed, in which lexical units (word senses) are annotated with basic emotions, fundamental human values and sentiment polarisation. The annotation process is performed manually in the 2+1 scheme by pairs of linguists and psychologies. Guidelines referring to the usage in corpora, substitution tests as well linguistic properties of lexical units (e.g. derivational associations) are discussed. Application of the model in a substantial extension of the emotive annotation of plWordNet is presented. The achieved high inter-annotator agreement shows that with relatively small workload a promising emotive resource can be created.

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The Company They Keep: Extracting Japanese Neologisms Using Language Patterns
James Breen | Timothy Baldwin | Francis Bond

We describe an investigation into the identification and extraction of unrecorded potential lexical items in Japanese text by detecting text passages containing selected language patterns typically associated with such items. We identified a set of suitable patterns, then tested them with two large collections of text drawn from the WWW and Twitter. Samples of the extracted items were evaluated, and it was demonstrated that the approach has considerable potential for identifying terms for later lexicographic analysis.

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Lexical-semantic resources: yet powerful resources for automatic personality classification
Xuan-Son Vu | Lucie Flekova | Lili Jiang | Iryna Gurevych

In this paper, we aim to reveal the impact of lexical-semantic resources, used in particular for word sense disambiguation and sense-level semantic categorization, on automatic personality classification task. While stylistic features (e.g., part-of-speech counts) have been shown their power in this task, the impact of semantics beyond targeted word lists is relatively unexplored. We propose and extract three types of lexical-semantic features, which capture high-level concepts and emotions, overcoming the lexical gap of word n-grams. Our experimental results are comparable to state-of-the-art methods, while no personality-specific resources are required.

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Towards a principled approach to sense clustering – a case study of wordnet and dictionary senses in Danish
Bolette Pedersen | Manex Agirrezabal | Sanni Nimb | Ida Olsen | Sussi Olsen

Our aim is to develop principled methods for sense clustering which can make existing lexical resources practically useful in NLP – not too fine-grained to be operational and yet finegrained enough to be worth the trouble. Where traditional dictionaries have a highly structured sense inventory typically describing the vocabulary by means of mainand subsenses, wordnets are generally fine-grained and unstructured. We present a series of clustering and annotation experiments with 10 of the most polysemous nouns in Danish. We combine the structured information of a traditional Danish dictionary with the ontological types found in the Danish wordnet, DanNet. This constellation enables us to automatically cluster senses in a principled way and improve inter-annotator agreement and wsd performance.

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WordnetLoom – a Multilingual Wordnet Editing System Focused on Graph-based Presentation
Tomasz Naskręt | Agnieszka Dziob | Maciej Piasecki | Chakaveh Saedi | António Branco

The paper presents a new re-built and expanded, version 2.0 of WordnetLoom – an open wordnet editor. It facilitates work on a multilingual system of wordnets, is based on efficient software architecture of thin client, and offers more flexibility in enriching wordnet representation. This new version is built on the experience collected during the use of the previous one for more than 10 years of plWordNet development. We discuss its extensions motivated by the collected experience. A special focus is given to the development of a variant for the needs of MultiWordnet of Portuguese, which is based on a very different wordnet development model.

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Translation Equivalence and Synonymy: Preserving the Synsets in Cross-lingual Wordnets
Oi Yee Kwong

The Princeton WordNet for English was founded on the synonymy relation, and multilingual wordnets are primarily developed by creating equivalent synsets in the respective languages. The process would often rely on translation equivalents obtained from existing bilingual dictionaries. This paper discusses some observations from the Chinese Open Wordnet, especially from the adjective subnet, to illuminate potential blind spots of the approach which may lead to the formation of non-synsets in the new wordnet. With cross-linguistic differences duly taken into account, alternative representations of cross-lingual lexical relations are proposed to better capture the language-specific properties. It is also suggested that such cross-lingual representation encompassing the cognitive as well as linguistic aspects of meaning is beneficial for a lexical resource to be used by both humans and computers.

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Lexical Perspective on Wordnet to Wordnet Mapping
Ewa Rudnicka | Francis Bond | Łukasz Grabowski | Maciej Piasecki | Tadeusz Piotrowski

The paper presents a feature-based model of equivalence targeted at (manual) sense linking between Princeton WordNet and plWordNet. The model incorporates insights from lexicographic and translation theories on bilingual equivalence and draws on the results of earlier synset-level mapping of nouns between Princeton WordNet and plWordNet. It takes into account all basic aspects of language such as form, meaning and function and supplements them with (parallel) corpus frequency and translatability. Three types of equivalence are distinguished, namely strong, regular and weak depending on the conformity with the proposed features. The presented solutions are language-neutral and they can be easily applied to language pairs other than Polish and English. Sense-level mapping is a more fine-grained mapping than the existing synset mappings and is thus of great potential to human and machine translation.

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ReferenceNet: a semantic-pragmatic network for capturing reference relations.
Piek Vossen | Filip Ilievski | Marten Postrma

In this paper, we present ReferenceNet: a semantic-pragmatic network of reference relations between synsets. Synonyms are assumed to be exchangeable in similar contexts and also word embeddings are based on sharing of local contexts represented as vectors. Co-referring words, however, tend to occur in the same topical context but in different local contexts. In addition, they may express different concepts related through topical coherence, and through author framing and perspective. In this paper, we describe how reference relations can be added to WordNet and how they can be acquired. We evaluate two methods of extracting event coreference relations using WordNet relations against a manual annotation of 38 documents within the same topical domain of gun violence. We conclude that precision is reasonable but recall is lower because the WordNet hierarchy does not sufficiently capture the required coherence and perspective relations.

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Wordnet-based Evaluation of Large Distributional Models for Polish
Maciej Piasecki | Gabriela Czachor | Arkadiusz Janz | Dominik Kaszewski | Paweł Kędzia

The paper presents construction of large scale test datasets for word embeddings on the basis of a very large wordnet. They were next applied for evaluation of word embedding models and used to assess and compare the usefulness of different word embeddings extracted from a very large corpus of Polish. We analysed also and compared several publicly available models described in literature. In addition, several large word embeddings models built on the basis of a very large Polish corpus are presented.

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Distant Supervision for Relation Extraction with Multi-sense Word Embedding
Sangha Nam | Kijong Han | Eun-Kyung Kim | Key-Sun Choi

Distant supervision can automatically generate labeled data between a large-scale corpus and a knowledge base without utilizing human efforts. Therefore, many studies have used the distant supervision approach in relation extraction tasks. However, existing studies have a disadvantage in that they do not reflect the homograph in the word embedding used as an input of the relation extraction model. Thus, it can be seen that the relation extraction model learns without grasping the meaning of the word accurately. In this paper, we propose a relation extraction model with multi-sense word embedding. We learn multi-sense word embedding using a word sense disambiguation module. In addition, we use convolutional neural network and piecewise max pooling convolutional neural network relation extraction models that efficiently grasp key features in sentences. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model, two additional methods of word embedding were learned and compared. Accordingly, our method showed the highest performance among them.

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Cross-Lingual and Supervised Learning Approach for Indonesian Word Sense Disambiguation Task
Rahmad Mahendra | Heninggar Septiantri | Haryo Akbarianto Wibowo | Ruli Manurung | Mirna Adriani

Ambiguity is a problem we frequently face in Natural Language Processing. Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is a task to determine the correct sense of an ambiguous word. However, research in WSD for Indonesian is still rare to find. The availability of English-Indonesian parallel corpora and WordNet for both languages can be used as training data for WSD by applying Cross-Lingual WSD method. This training data is used as an input to build a model using supervised machine learning algorithms. Our research also examines the use of Word Embedding features to build the WSD model.

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Recognition of Hyponymy and Meronymy Relations in Word Embeddings for Polish
Gabriela Czachor | Maciej Piasecki | Arkadiusz Janz

Word embeddings were used for the extraction of hyponymy relation in several approaches, but also it was recently shown that they should not work, in fact. In our work we verified both claims using a very large wordnet of Polish as a gold standard for lexico-semantic relations and word embeddings extracted from a very large corpus of Polish. We showed that a hyponymy extraction method based on linear regression classifiers trained on clusters of vectors can be successfully applied on large scale. We presented also a possible explanation for contradictory findings in the literature. Moreover, in order to show the feasibility of the method we extended it to the recognition of meronymy.

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Simple Embedding-Based Word Sense Disambiguation
Dieke Oele | Gertjan van Noord

We present a simple knowledge-based WSD method that uses word and sense embeddings to compute the similarity between the gloss of a sense and the context of the word. Our method is inspired by the Lesk algorithm as it exploits both the context of the words and the definitions of the senses. It only requires large unlabeled corpora and a sense inventory such as WordNet, and therefore does not rely on annotated data. We explore whether additional extensions to Lesk are compatible with our method. The results of our experiments show that by lexically extending the amount of words in the gloss and context, although it works well for other implementations of Lesk, harms our method. Using a lexical selection method on the context words, on the other hand, improves it. The combination of our method with lexical selection enables our method to outperform state-of the art knowledge-based systems.

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Semi-automatic WordNet Linking using Word Embeddings
Kevin Patel | Diptesh Kanojia | Pushpak Bhattacharyya

Wordnets are rich lexico-semantic resources. Linked wordnets are extensions of wordnets, which link similar concepts in wordnets of different languages. Such resources are extremely useful in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications, primarily those based on knowledge-based approaches. In such approaches, these resources are considered as gold standard/oracle. Thus, it is crucial that these resources hold correct information. Thereby, they are created by human experts. However, manual maintenance of such resources is a tedious and costly affair. Thus techniques that can aid the experts are desirable. In this paper, we propose an approach to link wordnets. Given a synset of the source language, the approach returns a ranked list of potential candidate synsets in the target language from which the human expert can choose the correct one(s). Our technique is able to retrieve a winner synset in the top 10 ranked list for 60% of all synsets and 70% of noun synsets.

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Multilingual Wordnet sense Ranking using nearest context
E Umamaheswari Vasanthakumar | Francis Bond

In this paper, we combine methods to estimate sense rankings from raw text with recent work on word embeddings to provide sense ranking estimates for the entries in the Open Multilingual WordNet (OMW). The existing Word2Vec pre-trained models from Polygot2 are only built for single word entries, we, therefore, re-train them with multiword expressions from the wordnets, so that multiword expressions can also be ranked. Thus this trained model gives embeddings for both single words and multiwords. The resulting lexicon gives a WSD baseline for five languages. The results are evaluated for Semcor sense corpora for 5 languages using Word2Vec and Glove models. The Glove model achieves an average accuracy of 0.47 and Word2Vec achieves 0.31 for languages such as English, Italian, Indonesian, Chinese and Japanese. The experimentation on OMW sense ranking proves that the rank correlation is generally similar to the human ranking. Hence distributional semantics can aid in Wordnet Sense Ranking.

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Grammatical Role Embeddings for Enhancements of Relation Density in the Princeton WordNet
Kiril Simov | Alexander Popov | Iliana Simova | Petya Osenova

In this paper we present an approach for training verb subatom embeddings. For each verb we learn several embeddings rather than only one. These embeddings include the verb itself as well as embeddings for each grammatical role of this verb. To give an example, for the verb ‘to give’ we learn four embeddings: one for the lemma ‘give’, one for the subject, one for the direct object and one for the indirect object. We have exploited these grammatical role embeddings in order to add new syntagmatic relations to WordNet. The evaluation of the new relations quality has been done extrinsically through the Knowledge-based Word Sense Disambiguation task.

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An Iterative Approach for Unsupervised Most Frequent Sense Detection using WordNet and Word Embeddings
Kevin Patel | Pushpak Bhattacharyya

Given a word, what is the most frequent sense in which it occurs in a given corpus? Most Frequent Sense (MFS) is a strong baseline for unsupervised word sense disambiguation. If we have large amounts of sense-annotated corpora, MFS can be trivially created. However, sense-annotated corpora are a rarity. In this paper, we propose a method which can compute MFS from raw corpora. Our approach iteratively exploits the semantic congruity among related words in corpus. Our method performs better compared to another similar work.

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Automatic Identification of Basic-Level Categories
Chad Mills | Francis Bond | Gina-Anne Levow

Basic-level categories have been shown to be both psychologically significant and useful in a wide range of practical applications. We build a rule-based system to identify basic-level categories in WordNet, achieving 77% accuracy on a test set derived from prior psychological experiments. With additional annotations we found our system also has low precision, in part due to the existence of many categories that do not fit into the three classes (superordinate, basic-level, and subordinate) relied on in basic-level category research.

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African Wordnet: facilitating language learning in African languages
Sonja Bosch | Marissa Griesel

The development of the African Wordnet (AWN) has reached a stage of maturity where the first steps towards an application can be attempted. The AWN is based on the expand method, and to compensate for the general resource scarceness of the African languages, various development strategies were used. The aim of this paper is to investigate the usefulness of the current isiZulu Wordnet in an application such as language learning. The advantage of incorporating the wordnet of a language into a language learning system is that it provides learners with an integrated application to enhance their learning experience by means of the unique sense identification features of wordnets. In this paper it will be demonstrated by means of a variety of examples within the context of a basic free online course how the isiZulu Wordnet can offer the language learner improved decision support.

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Hindi Wordnet for Language Teaching: Experiences and Lessons Learnt
Hanumant Redkar | Rajita Shukla | Sandhya Singh | Jaya Saraswati | Laxmi Kashyap | Diptesh Kanojia | Preethi Jyothi | Malhar Kulkarni | Pushpak Bhattacharyya

This paper reports the work related to making Hindi Wordnet1 available as a digital resource for language learning and teaching, and the experiences and lessons that were learnt during the process. The language data of the Hindi Wordnet has been suitably modified and enhanced to make it into a language learning aid. This aid is based on modern pedagogical axioms and is aligned to the learning objectives of the syllabi of the school education in India. To make it into a comprehensive language tool, grammatical information has also been encoded, as far as these can be marked on the lexical items. The delivery of information is multi-layered, multi-sensory and is available across multiple digital platforms. The front end has been designed to offer an eye-catching user-friendly interface which is suitable for learners starting from age six onward. Preliminary testing of the tool has been done and it has been modified as per the feedbacks that were received. Above all, the entire exercise has offered gainful insights into learning based on associative networks and how knowledge based on such networks can be made available to modern learners.

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An Experiment: Using Google Translate and Semantic Mirrors to Create Synsets with Many Lexical Units
Ahti Lohk | Mati Tombak | Kadri Vare

One of the fundamental building blocks of a wordnet is synonym sets or synsets, which group together similar word meanings or synonyms. These synsets can consist either one or more synonyms. This paper describes an automatic method for composing synsets with multiple synonyms by using Google Translate and Semantic Mirrors’ method. Also, we will give an overview of the results and discuss the advantages of the proposed method from wordnet’s point of view.

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Context-sensitive Sentiment Propagation in WordNet
Jan Kocoń | Arkadiusz Janz | Maciej Piasecki

In this paper we present a comprehensive overview of recent methods of the sentiment propagation in a wordnet. Next, we propose a fully automated method called Classifier-based Polarity Propagation, which utilises a very rich set of features, where most of them are based on wordnet relation types, multi-level bag-of-synsets and bag-of-polarities. We have evaluated our solution using manually annotated part of plWordNet 3.1 emo, which contains more than 83k manual sentiment annotations, covering more than 41k synsets. We have demonstrated that in comparison to existing rule-based methods using a specific narrow set of semantic relations our method has achieved statistically significant and better results starting with the same seed synsets.

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ELEXIS - a European infrastructure fostering cooperation and information exchange among lexicographical research communities
Bolette Pedersen | John McCrae | Carole Tiberius | Simon Krek

The paper describes objectives, concept and methodology for ELEXIS, a European infrastructure fostering cooperation and information exchange among lexicographical research communities. The infrastructure is a newly granted project under the Horizon 2020 INFRAIA call, with the topic Integrating Activities for Starting Communities. The project is planned to start in January 2018.

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Enchancing the Collaborative Interlingual Index for Digital Humanities: Cross-linguistic Analysis in the Domain of Theology
Laura Slaughter | Wenjie Wang | Luis Morgado Da Costa | Francis Bond

We aim to support digital humanities work related to the study of sacred texts. To do this, we propose to build a cross-lingual wordnet within the do-main of theology. We target the Collaborative Interlingual Index (CILI) directly instead of each individual wordnet. The paper presents background for this proposal: (1) an overview of concepts relevant to theology and (2) a summary of the domain-associated issues observed in the Princeton WordNet (PWN). We have found that definitions for concepts in this domain can be too restrictive, inconsistent, and unclear. Necessary synsets are missing, with the PWN being skewed towards Christianity. We argue that tackling problems in a single domain is a better method for improving CILI. By focusing on a single topic rather than a single language, this will result in the proper construction of definitions, romanization/translation of lemmas, and also improvements in use of/creation of a cross-lingual domain hierarchy.

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Estonian Wordnet: Current State and Future Prospects
Heili Orav | Kadri Vare | Sirli Zupping

This paper presents Estonian Wordnet (EstWN) with its latest developments. We are focusing on the time period of 2011–2017 because during this time EstWN project was supported by the National Programme for Estonian Language Technology (NPELT1). We describe which were the goals at the beginning of 2011 and what are the accomplishments today. This paper serves as a summarizing report about the progress of EstWN during this programme. While building EstWN we have been concentrating on the fact, that EstWN as a valuable Estonian resource would also be compatible in a common multilingual framework.

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Further expansion of the Croatian WordNet
Krešimir Šojat | Matea Filko | Antoni Oliver

In this paper a semi-automatic procedure for the expansion of the Croatian Wordnet (CroWN) is presented. An English-Croatian dictionary was used in order to translate monosemous PWN 3.0 English variants. The precision values of the automatic process is low (about 30%), but the results proved valuable for the enlargment of CroWN. After manual validation, 10,884 new synset-variant pairs were added to CroWN, achieving a total of 62,075 synset-variant pairs.

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Linking WordNet to 3D Shapes
Angel X Chang | Rishi Mago | Pranav Krishna | Manolis Savva | Christiane Fellbaum

We describe a project to link the Princeton WordNet to 3D representations of real objects and scenes. The goal is to establish a dataset that helps us to understand how people categorize everyday common objects via their parts, attributes, and context. This paper describes the annotation and data collection effort so far as well as ideas for future work.

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Multisłownik: Linking plWordNet-based Lexical Data for Lexicography and Educational Purposes
Maciej Ogrodniczuk | Joanna Bilińska | Zbigniew Bronk | Witold Kieraś

Multisłownik is an automated integrator of Polish lexical data retrieved from multiple available online sources intended to be used in various scenarios requiring access to such data, most prominently dictionary creation, linguistic studies and education. In contrast to many available internet dictionaries Multisłownik is WordNet-centric, capturing the core definitions from Słowosiec ́, the Polish WordNet, and linking external resources to particular synsets. The paper provides details of construction of the resource, discussed the difficulties related to linking different logical structures of underlying data and investigates two sample scenarios for using the resulting platform.

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Putting Figures on Influences on Moroccan Darija from Arabic, French and Spanish using the WordNet
Khalil Mrini | Francis Bond

Moroccan Darija is a variant of Arabic with many influences. Using the Open Multilingual WordNet (OMW), we compare the lemmas in the Moroccan Darija Wordnet (MDW) with the standard Arabic, French and Spanish ones. We then compared the lemmas in each synset with their translation equivalents. Transliteration is used to bridge alphabet differences and match lemmas in the closest phonological way. The results put figures on the similarity Moroccan Darija has with Arabic, French and Spanish: respectively 42.0%, 2.8% and 2.2%.

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pyiwn: A Python based API to access Indian Language WordNets
Ritesh Panjwani | Diptesh Kanojia | Pushpak Bhattacharyya

Indian language WordNets have their individual web-based browsing interfaces along with a common interface for IndoWordNet. These interfaces prove to be useful for language learners and in an educational domain, however, they do not provide the functionality of connecting to them and browsing their data through a lucid application programming interface or an API. In this paper, we present our work on creating such an easy-to-use framework which is bundled with the data for Indian language WordNets and provides NLTK WordNet interface like core functionalities in Python. Additionally, we use a pre-built speech synthesis system for Hindi language and augment Hindi data with audios for words, glosses, and example sentences. We provide a detailed usage of our API and explain the functions for ease of the user. Also, we package the IndoWordNet data along with the source code and provide it openly for the purpose of research. We aim to provide all our work as an open source framework for further development.

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Sinitic Wordnet: Laying the Groundwork with Chinese Varieties Written in Traditional Characters
Chih-Yao Lee | Shu-Kai Hsieh

The present work seeks to make the logographic nature of Chinese script a relevant research ground in wordnet studies. While wordnets are not so much about words as about the concepts represented in words, synset formation inevitably involves the use of orthographic and/or phonetic representations to serve as headword for a given concept. For wordnets of Chinese languages, if their synsets are mapped with each other, the connection from logographic forms to lexicalized concepts can be explored backwards to, for instance, help trace the development of cognates in different varieties of Chinese. The Sinitic Wordnet project is an attempt to construct such an integrated wordnet that aggregates three Chinese varieties that are widely spoken in Taiwan and all written in traditional Chinese characters.

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Synthesizing Audio for Hindi WordNet
Diptesh Kanojia | Preethi Jyothi | Pushpak Bhattacharyya

In this paper, we describe our work on the creation of a voice model using a speech synthesis system for the Hindi Language. We use pre-existing “voices”, use publicly available speech corpora to create a “voice” using the Festival Speech Synthesis System (Black, 1997). Our contribution is two-fold: (1) We scrutinize multiple speech synthesis systems and provide an extensive report on the currently available state-of-the-art systems. We also develop voices using the existing implementations of the aforementioned systems, and (2) We use these voices to generate sample audios for randomly chosen words; manually evaluate the audio generated, and produce audio for all WordNet words using the winner voice model. We also produce audios for the Hindi WordNet Glosses and Example sentences. We describe our efforts to use pre-existing implementations for WaveNet - a model to generate raw audio using neural nets (Oord et al., 2016) and generate speech for Hindi. Our lexicographers perform a manual evaluation of the audio generated using multiple voices. A qualitative and quantitative analysis reveals that the voice model generated by us performs the best with an accuracy of 0.44.

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Toward Constructing the National Cancer Institute Thesaurus Derived WordNet (ncitWN)
Amanda Hicks | Selja Seppälä | Francis Bond

We describe preliminary work in the creation of the first specialized vocabulary to be integrated into the Open Multilingual Wordnet (OMW). The NCIt Derived WordNet (ncitWN) is based on the National Cancer Institute Thesaurus (NCIt), a controlled biomedical terminology that includes formal class restrictions and English definitions developed by groups of clinicians and terminologists. The ncitWN is created by converting the NCIt to the WordNet Lexical Markup Framework and adding semantic types. We report the development of a prototype ncitWN and first steps towards integrating it into the OMW.

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Towards a Crowd-Sourced WordNet for Colloquial English
John P. McCrae | Ian Wood | Amanda Hicks

Princeton WordNet is one of the most widely-used resources for natural language processing, but is updated only infrequently and cannot keep up with the fast-changing usage of the English language on social media platforms such as Twitter. The Colloquial WordNet aims to provide an open platform whereby anyone can contribute, while still following the structure of WordNet. Many crowd-sourced lexical resources often have significant quality issues, and as such care must be taken in the design of the interface to ensure quality. In this paper, we present the development of a platform that can be opened on the Web to any lexicographer who wishes to contribute to this resource and the lexicographic methodology applied by this interface.

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WordNet Troponymy and Extraction of “Manner-Result” Relations
Aliaksandr Huminski | Hao Zhang

Commonsense knowledge bases need to have relations that allow to predict the consequences of specific actions (say, if John stabbed Peter, Peter might be killed) and to unfold the possible actions for the specific results (Peter was killed. It could happen because of poisoning, stabbing, shooting, etc.) This kind of causal relations are established between manner verbs and result verbs: manner-result relations. We offer a procedure on how to extract manner-result relations from WordNet through the analysis of the troponym glosses. The procedure of extraction includes three steps and the results are based on the analysis of the whole set of verbs in WordNet.

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SardaNet: a Linguistic Resource for Sardinian Language
Manuela Angioni | Franco Tuveri | Maurizio Virdis | Laura Lucia Lai | Micol Elisa Maltesi

This paper describes the process of building SardaNet, a linguistic resource for Sardinian language including the different linguistic varieties in Sardinia. SardaNet aims at identifying the semantic relations between Sardinian terms, by manually mapping existing WordNet entries to Sardinian word senses. The work, still in progress, has been developed in collaboration with the University of Cagliari. After discussing some linguistic peculiarities, the paper presents the basic steps of the construction process, the method and the tools involved, the issues encountered during the development and the current version of SardaNet.

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Extraction of Verbal Synsets and Relations for FarsNet
Fatemeh Khalghani | Mehrnoush Shamsfard

WordNet or ontology development for resource-poor languages like Persian, requires composition of several strategies and employment of appropriate heuristics. Lexical and linguistic structured resources are limited for Persian and there is a lot of diversity and structural and syntagmatic complexities. This paper proposes a system for extraction of verbal synsets and relations to extend FarsNet (Persian WordNet). The proposed method extracts verbal words and concepts using noun and adjective words and synsets. It exploits the data from digital lexicon glossaries, which leads to the identification of 6890 proper verbal words and 2790 verbal synsets, with 91% and 67% precision respectively. The proposed system also extracts relations such as semantic roles of verbal arguments (instrument, location, agent, and patient) and also “related-to” (unlabeled) relations and co-occurrence among verbs and other concepts. For this purpose, a combination of linguistic approaches such as morphological analysis of words, semantic analysis, and use of key phrases and syntactic and semantic patterns, corpus-based approach, statistical techniques and co-occurrence analysis have been utilized. The presented strategy extracts 5600 proper relations between the existing concepts in FarsNet 2.0 with 76% precision.