In this project note we describe our work to make better documentation for the Open Multilingual Wordnet (OMW), a platform integrating many open wordnets. This includes the documentation of the OMW website itself as well as of semantic relations used by the component wordnets. Some of this documentation work was done with the support of the Google Season of Docs. The OMW project page, which links both to the actual OMW server and the documentation has been moved to a new location: https://omwn.org.

This paper introduces the Open Cantonese Sense-Tagged Corpus, a new and ongoing project to serve as the companion to the development of the Cantonese Wordnet. This corpus is built on top of the Cantonese Wordnet Corpus, which currently provides example sentences for most verbs in this wordnet. This paper motivates the choice of starting a sense-tagged corpus from both linguistic and educational perspectives, and discusses the current solutions to issues arisen from the sense-tagging exercise. In total, we have tagged over 5,000 concepts, with more than 3,700 direct links to the Cantonese Wordnet.

In this paper we describe a new methodology to expand the Abui Wordnet through data collected using the Rapid Word Collection (RWC) method – based on SIL’s Semantic Domains. Using a multilingual sense-intersection algorithm, we created a ranked list of concept suggestions for each domain, and then used the ranked list as a filter to link the Abui RWC data to wordnet. This used translations from both SIL’s Semantic Domain’s structure and example words, both available through SIL’s Fieldworks software and the RWC project. We release both the new mapping of the SIL Semantic Domains to wordnet and an expansion of the Abui Wordnet.

This paper reports on the most recent improvements on the Cantonese Wordnet, a wordnet project started in 2019 (Sio and Morgado da Costa, 2019) with the aim of capturing and organizing lexico-semantic information of Hong Kong Cantonese. The improvements we present here extend both the breadth and depth of the Cantonese Wordnet: increasing the general coverage, adding functional categories, enriching verbal representations, as well as creating the Cantonese Wordnet Corpus – a corpus of handcrafted examples where individual senses are shown in context.

This paper reports on the creation and development of the Tembusu Learner Treebank — an open treebank created from the NTU Corpus of Learner English, unique for incorporating mal-rules in the annotation of ungrammatical sentences. It describes the motivation and development of the treebank, as well as its exploitation to build a new parse-ranking model for the English Resource Grammar, designed to help improve the parse selection of ungrammatical sentences and diagnose these sentences through mal-rules. The corpus contains 25,000 sentences, of which 4,900 are treebanked. The paper concludes with an evaluation experiment that shows the usefulness of this new treebank in the tasks of grammatical error detection and diagnosis.

This paper describes a procedure to link a Toolbox dictionary of a low-resource language to correct synsets, generating a new wordnet. We introduce a bootstrapping technique utilising the information in the gloss fields (English, national, and regional) to generate sense candidates using a naive algorithm based on multilingual sense intersection. We show that this technique is quite effective when glosses are available in more than one language. Our technique complements the previous work by Rosman et al. (2014) which linked the SIL Semantic Domains to wordnet senses. Through this work we have created a small, fully hand-checked wordnet for Abui, containing over 1,400 concepts and 3,600 senses.

This paper presents the on-going effort to annotate a cross-lingual corpus on nominal referring expressions in English and Mandarin Chinese. The annotation includes referential forms and referential (information) statuses. We adopt the RefLex annotation scheme (Baumann and Riester, 2012) for the classification of referential statuses. The data focus of this paper is restricted to [the-X] phrases in English (where X stands for any nominal) and their translation equivalents in Mandarin Chinese. The original English and translated Mandarin versions of ‘The Adventure of the Dancing Men’ and ‘The Adventure of Speckled Band’ from the Sherlock Holmes series were annotated. It contains 1090 instances of [the-X] phrases in English. Our study uncovers the following: (i) bare nouns are the most common Mandarin translation for [the-X] phrases in English, followed by demonstrative phrases, with the exception that when the noun phrase refers to locations/places, in such cases, demonstrative phrases are almost never used; (ii) [the-X] phrases in English are more likely to be translated as demonstrative phrases in Mandarin if they have the referential status of ‘given’ (previously mentioned) or ‘given-displaced’(antecedent of an expression occurs earlier than the previous five clauses). In these Mandarin demonstrative phrases, the proximal demonstrative is more often used and it is almost exclusively used for ‘given’ while the distal demonstrative can be used for both ‘given’ and ‘given-displaced’.

The Global Wordnet Formats have been introduced to enable wordnets to have a common representation that can be integrated through the Global WordNet Grid. As a result of their adoption, a number of shortcomings of the format were identified, and in this paper we describe the extensions to the formats that address these issues. These include: ordering of senses, dependencies between wordnets, pronunciation, syntactic modelling, relations, sense keys, metadata and RDF support. Furthermore, we provide some perspectives on how these changes help in the integration of wordnets.

In this paper we discuss an ongoing effort to enrich students’ learning by involving them in sense tagging. The main goal is to lead students to discover how we can represent meaning and where the limits of our current theories lie. A subsidiary goal is to create sense tagged corpora and an accompanying linked lexicon (in our case wordnets). We present the results of tagging several texts and suggest some ways in which the tagging process could be improved. Two authors of this paper present their own experience as students. Overall, students reported that they found the tagging an enriching experience. The annotated corpora and changes to the wordnet are made available through the NTU multilingual corpus and associated wordnets (NTU-MC).

In this paper, we present the ongoing development of CALLIG – a web system that uses improvisation games in Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). Improvisation games are structured activities with built-in constraints where improvisers are asked to generate a lot of different ideas and weave a diverse range of elements into a sensible narrative spontaneously. This paper discusses how computer-based language games can be created combining improvisation elements and language technology. In contrast with traditional language exercises, improvisational language games are open and unpredictable. CALLIG encourages spontaneity and witty language use. It also provides opportunities for collecting useful data for many NLP applications.

This paper introduces a new web system that integrates English Grammatical Error Detection (GED) and course-specific stylistic guidelines to automatically review and provide feedback on student assignments. The system is being developed as a pedagogical tool for English Scientific Writing. It uses both general NLP methods and high precision parsers to check student assignments before they are submitted for grading. Instead of generalized error detection, our system aims to identify, with high precision, specific classes of problems that are known to be common among engineering students. Rather than correct the errors, our system generates constructive feedback to help students identify and correct them on their own. A preliminary evaluation of the system’s in-class performance has shown measurable improvements in the quality of student assignments.

We describe the linking of the TUFS Basic Vocabulary Modules, created for online language learning, with the Open Multilingual Wordnet. The TUFS modules have roughly 500 lexical entries in 30 languages, each with the lemma, a link across the languages, an example sentence, usage notes and sound files. The Open Multilingual Wordnet has 34 languages (11 shared with TUFS) organized into synsets linked by semantic relations, with examples and definitions for some languages. The links can be used to (i) evaluate existing wordnets, (ii) add data to these wordnets and (iii) create new open wordnets for Khmer, Korean, Lao, Mongolian, Russian, Tagalog, Urdua nd Vietnamese

In this paper we discuss the experience of bringing together over 40 different wordnets. We introduce some extensions to the GWA wordnet LMF format proposed in Vossen et al. (2016) and look at how this new information can be displayed. Notable extensions include: confidence, corpus frequency, orthographic variants, lexicalized and non-lexicalized synsets and lemmas, new parts of speech, and more. Many of these extensions already exist in multiple wordnets – the challenge was to find a compatible representation. To this end, we introduce a new version of the Open Multilingual Wordnet (Bond and Foster, 2013), that integrates a new set of tools that tests the extensions introduced by this new format, while also ensuring the integrity of the Collaborative Interlingual Index (CILI: Bond et al., 2016), avoiding the same new concept to be introduced through multiple projects.

This paper describes the development and current state of Pinchah Kristang – an online dictionary for Kristang. Kristang is a critically endangered language of the Portuguese-Eurasian communities residing mainly in Malacca and Singapore. Pinchah Kristang has been a central tool to the revitalization efforts of Kristang in Singapore, and collates information from multiple sources, including existing dictionaries and wordlists, ongoing language documentation work, and new words that emerge regularly from relexification efforts by the community. This online dictionary is powered by the Princeton Wordnet and the Open Kristang Wordnet – a choice that brings both advantages and disadvantages. This paper will introduce the current version of this dictionary, motivate some of its design choices, and discuss possible future directions.

With the increasing availability of wordnets for ancient languages, such as Ancient Greek and Latin, gaps remain in the coverage of less studied languages of antiquity. This paper reports on the construction and evaluation of a new wordnet for Coptic, the language of Late Roman, Byzantine and Early Islamic Egypt in the first millenium CE. We present our approach to constructing the wordnet which uses multilingual Coptic dictionaries and wordnets for five different languages. We further discuss the results of this effort and outline our on-going/future work.

This paper reports on the development of the Cantonese Wordnet, a new wordnet project based on Hong Kong Cantonese. It is built using the expansion approach, leveraging on the existing Chinese Open Wordnet, and the Princeton Wordnet’s semantic hierarchy. The main goal of our project was to produce a high quality, human-curated resource – and this paper reports on the initial efforts and steady progress of our building method. It is our belief that the lexical data made available by this wordnet, including Jyutping romanization, will be useful for a variety of future uses, including many language processing tasks and linguistic research on Cantonese and its interactions with other Chinese dialects.

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.

This paper describes the creation of a new annotated learner corpus. The aim is to use this corpus to develop an automated system for corrective feedback on students’ writing. With this system, students will be able to receive timely feedback on language errors before they submit their assignments for grading. A corpus of assignments submitted by first year engineering students was compiled, and a new error tag set for the NTU Corpus of Learner English (NTUCLE) was developed based on that of the NUS Corpus of Learner English (NUCLE), as well as marking rubrics used at NTU. After a description of the corpus, error tag set and annotation process, the paper presents the results of the annotation exercise as well as follow up actions. The final error tag set, which is significantly larger than that for the NUCLE error categories, is then presented before a brief conclusion summarising our experience and future plans.

We present a novel approach to Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), using deep syntactic parsers and semantic based machine translation (MT) in diagnosing and providing explicit feedback on language learners’ errors. We are currently developing a proof of concept system showing how semantic-based machine translation can, in conjunction with robust computational grammars, be used to interact with students, better understand their language errors, and help students correct their grammar through a series of useful feedback messages and guided language drills. Ultimately, we aim to prove the viability of a new integrated rule-based MT approach to disambiguate students’ intended meaning in a CALL system. This is a necessary step to provide accurate coaching on how to correct ungrammatical input, and it will allow us to overcome a current bottleneck in the field — an exponential burst of ambiguity caused by ambiguous lexical items (Flickinger, 2010). From the users’ interaction with the system, we will also produce a richly annotated Learner Corpus, annotated automatically with both syntactic and semantic information.

In this paper we present the ongoing efforts to expand the depth and breath of the Open Multilingual Wordnet coverage by introducing two new classes of non-referential concepts to wordnet hierarchies: interjections and numeral classifiers. The lexical semantic hierarchy pioneered by Princeton Wordnet has traditionally restricted its coverage to referential and contentful classes of words: such as nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Previous efforts have been employed to enrich wordnet resources including, for example, the inclusion of pronouns, determiners and quantifiers within their hierarchies. Following similar efforts, and motivated by the ongoing semantic annotation of the NTU-Multilingual Corpus, we decided that the four traditional classes of words present in wordnets were too restrictive. Though non-referential, interjections and classifiers possess interesting semantics features that can be well captured by lexical resources like wordnets. In this paper, we will further motivate our decision to include non-referential concepts in wordnets and give an account of the current state of this expansion.

In languages such as Chinese, classifiers (CLs) play a central role in the quantification of noun-phrases. This can be a problem when generating text from input that does not specify the classifier, as in machine translation (MT) from English to Chinese. Many solutions to this problem rely on dictionaries of noun-CL pairs. However, there is no open large-scale machine-tractable dictionary of noun-CL associations. Many published resources exist, but they tend to focus on how a CL is used (e.g. what kinds of nouns can be used with it, or what features seem to be selected by each CL). In fact, since nouns are open class words, producing an exhaustive definite list of noun-CL associations is not possible, since it would quickly get out of date. Our work tries to address this problem by providing an algorithm for automatic building of a frequency based dictionary of noun-CL pairs, mapped to concepts in the Chinese Open Wordnet (Wang and Bond, 2013), an open machine-tractable dictionary for Chinese. All results will released under an open license.