Creating the Open Wordnet Bahasa

Creating the Open Wordnet Bahasa⋆ Nurril Hirfana Mohamed Noor and Suerya Sapuan and Francis Bond School of Humanities and Social Sciences Nanyang University of Technology hirfananoor@yahoo.com,suerya.sapuan@gmail.com,bond@ieee.org Abstract. This paper outlines the creation of the Wordnet Bahasa as a resource for the study of lexical semantics in the Malay language. It is created by combining information from several lexical resources: the French-English-Malay dictionary FEM, the KAmus Melayu- Inggeris KAMI, and wordnets for English, French and Chinese. Construction went through three steps: (i) automatic building of word candidates; (ii) evaluation and selection of accept- able candidates from merging of lexicons; (iii) final hand check of the 5,000 core synsets. Our Wordnet Bahasa is only in the first phase of building a full fledged wordNet and needs to be further expanded, however it is already large enough to be useful for sense tagging both Malay and Indonesian. Keywords: Wordnet, Malaysian, Indonesian, Hyponymy, Open Source 1 Introduction The dictionary is a very important lexical resource in any field of studies. However, WordNet, originally created by academics at Princeton University, is just as important if not greater (Fell- baum, 1998). In fact, it is a source of reference that takes the traditional dictionary to a whole new level. While a dictionary can provide information such as the meaning, synonyms and parts of speech, and can organise them in alphabetical order, a wordnet is able to organise the words into a set of cognitive synonyms (synsets) which express distinct concepts. This reason has been the motivation for the creation of the various wordnets for various languages. There is currently no wordnet available for Malay despite the great number of wordnets avail- able for many languages. Hence, this paper will attempt to create a lexical database for the Malay language based on alignments with other lexical resources — the French-English-Malay (FEM) dictionary, the English wordnet, KAMI and wordnets for Chinese and French. Crossing lexicons over several languages contributes to the accuracy of the Wordnet Bahasa. This wordnet will be released under an open source license (Creative Commons Attribution) in order to make it fully accessible to all potential users. Bahasa Melayu “the Malay language” is one that had been standardized over time with the aim of formal usage of the language. It derived from the variety of Malay languages that exist in the different parts of the Malay Archipelago, and is now widely used in Malaysia, Singapore, parts of Thailand and Brunei. The language spoken in Indonesia (Bahasa Indonesia) is very similar, and largely mutually intelligible. In this paper we will use Malay for standard Malay (the official lan- guage of Malaysia, ISO 639-3 code zsm), Indonesian to refer to the official language of Indonesia (ind) and Bahasa to refer to the generic Malay language that includes both (msa). Bahasa is the official language of four South Eastern Asian countries, namely Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei and ⋆ We would like to thank Key-Sun Choi for allowing us to use the Goi-Taikei–CoreNet–Wordnet mappings; Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation for …

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