Enriching WordNet Via Generative Metonymy and Creative Polysemy

AbstractMetonymy is a creative process that establishes relationships based on contiguity or semantic relatedness between concepts. We outline a mechanism for deriving new concepts from WordNet using metonymy. We argue that by exploiting polysemy in WordNet we can take advantage of the metonymic relations between concepts. The focus of our metonymy generation work has been the creation of noun­ noun compounds that do not already exist in WordNet and which can be profitably added to WordNet. The mechanism of metonymy generation we outline takes a source compound and creates new compounds by exploiting the polysemy associated with hyponyms of the head of the source compound. We argue that metonymy generation is a sound basis for concept creation as the newly created compounds are semantically related to the source concept. We demonstrate that metonymy generation based on polysemy is superior to a method of metonymy generation that ignores polysemy. These new concepts can be used to augment WordNet.