Wow! What a Useful Extension! Introducing Non-Referential Concepts to Wordnet

Wow! What a useful extension! Introducing Non-Referential Concepts to Wordnet Luis Morgado Da Costa and Francis Bond Linguistics and Multilingual Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore luis.passos.morgado@gmail.com, bond@ieee.com Abstract 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. Keywords: Non-Referential Concepts, Wordnet Interjections, Classifiers, Exclamatory Pronouns 1. Introduction In this paper we motivate and describe our ongoing efforts to expand the Open Multilingual Wordnet (OMW)’s cov- erage by introducing non-referential concepts to wordnet hierarchies (Bond and Foster, 2013). Namely, the intro- duction of interjections as a language independent class of concepts, and the introduction of numeral classifiers as a language specific class of concepts. This expansion has mainly been motivated by and done in parallel with the ongoing semantic annotation of the NTU- Multilingual Corpus: NTU-MC (Tan and Bond, 2011). The NTU-MC is a multilingual, multi-genre parallel corpus that is currently being tagged with the Princetong Wordnet, PWN (Fellbaum, 1998), the Japanese Wordnet (Isahara et al., 2008), the Chinese Open Wordnet (Wang and Bond, 2013) and the Wordnet Bahasa (Nurril Hirfana, Suerya and Bond, 2011) through the OMW. The original design of PWN, which the other three wordnet projects are based on, includes only contentful/referential open class words: nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. These classes of concepts are related by a coherent set of semantic relations (hypernmy, antonymy, meronymy, ...) within this lexical resource, and can be used to sense tag the most part of any given corpus. Most wordnet projects follow PWN, hence restricting the classes of words avail- able for annotation tasks using these resources. During the annotation the NTU-MC, we found several classes of words that we wanted to annotate, but that were not included in the original set of concepts that were de- scribed and linked by wordnets. The first class we added was pronouns, including demonstratives, interrogative, per- sonal and indefinite pronouns, and their associated modi- fiers (Seah and Bond, 2014). These were added primarily to allow cross-lingual linking of concepts, since it was of- ten the case that a noun in one language would be linked to a pronoun in another. In this paper we will, …

Content truncated to 500 words