A Major Wordnet for a Minority Language: Scottish Gaelic

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 2812–2818 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 2812 A Major Wordnet for a Minority Language: Scottish Gaelic G´abor Bella1, Fiona McNeill2, Rody Gorman3, Caoimh´ın ´O Donna´ıle3, Kirsty MacDonald, Yamini Chandrashekar1, Abed Alhakim Freihat1, and Fausto Giunchiglia1 1University of Trento, via Sommarive, 5, 38123 Trento, Italy 2Heriot–Watt University, Edinburgh, EH14 4AS, Scotland 3Sabhal M`or Ostaig, University of the Highlands and Islands, Sleat, Isle of Skye, IV44 8RQ, Scotland gabor.bella@unitn.it, f.mcneill@hw.ac.uk, anguth@btinternet.com, caoimhin@smo.uhi.ac.uk, curstag@gmail.com, yamini.chandrashekar@studenti.unitn.it, abdel.fraihat@gmail.com, fausto.giunchiglia@unitn.it Abstract We present a new wordnet resource for Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic minority language spoken by about 60,000 speakers, most of whom live in Northwestern Scotland. The wordnet contains over 15 thousand word senses and was constructed by merging ten thousand new, high-quality translations, provided and validated by language experts, with an existing wordnet derived from Wiktionary. This new, considerably extended wordnet—currently among the 30 largest in the world—targets multiple communities: language speakers and learners; linguists; computer scientists solving problems related to natural language processing. By publishing it as a freely down- loadable resource, we hope to contribute to the long-term preservation of Scottish Gaelic as a living language, both offline and on the Web. Keywords: wordnet, Scottish Gaelic, under-resourced language, minority language, lexical semantics, translation, lexical gap, language diversity 1. Introduction Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic language, derives from Middle Irish, yet it is considered today as a distinct language. While it used to be spoken throughout Scotland, its current speakers are estimated to be fewer than 60,000 (Census, 2011) and is considered as an endangered language. As the World Wide Web takes over ever higher portions of our everyday life, the accessibility, and ultimately the survival, of pretty much any idea or artifact is increasingly determined by its online visibility. As the seminal article on digital language death points out (Kornai, 2013), this observation also holds for languages: those that are not ac- tively used online will likely fall behind in their deemed usefulness by its potential speakers, accelerating their ex- tinction. For most minority languages, a further problem arises from the often incomplete lexicon with respect to modern terms, pertaining to inventions, discoveries, and other phenomena from the 20th and 21st centuries. The lack of suitable terms to designate contemporary concepts is perceived by poten- tial speakers as a hindrance to effective language use. Similar problems are faced from a computational perspec- tive: the weak online presence of minority languages, such as Scottish Gaelic (Gaelic in short in the rest of the paper), transpires as a lack of digital corpora, which prevents state- of-the-art data-driven language processing methods, such as machine translation, from being applied in an efficient manner. As an attempt to counter these tendencies, we release the Unified Scottish Gaelic Wordnet, a free lexico-semantic re- source containing over 10k words that lexicalise 13k word meanings (synsets in wordnet terminology).1 The resource was built by merging two sources: in a larger part …

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