Linking and Extending an Open Multilingual Wordnet

Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1352–1362, Sofia, Bulgaria, August 4-9 2013. c⃝2013 Association for Computational Linguistics Linking and Extending an Open Multilingual Wordnet Francis Bond Linguistics and Multilingual Studies Nanyang Technological University bond@ieee.org Ryan Foster Great Achievement Press ryan_foster@gapbks.com Abstract We create an open multilingual wordnet with large wordnets for over 26 languages and smaller ones for 57 languages. It is made by combining wordnets with open li- cences, data from Wiktionary and the Uni- code Common Locale Data Repository. Overall there are over 2 million senses for over 100 thousand concepts, linking over 1.4 million words in hundreds of lan- guages. 1 Introduction We wish to create a lexicon covering as many lan- guages as possible, with as much useful informa- tion as possible. Generally, language resources, to be useful, must be both accessible (legal to use) and usable (of sufficient quality, size and with a documented interface) (Ishida, 2006). We address both of these concerns in this paper. One of the many attractions of the semantic net- work WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998), is that there are numerous wordnets being built for different lan- guages. There are, in addition, many projects for groups of languages: Euro WordNet (Vossen, 1998), BalkaNet (Tufis¸ et al., 2004), Asian Word- net (Charoenporn et al., 2008) and more. Al- though there are over 60 languages for which wordnets exist in some state of development (Fell- baum and Vossen, 2012, 316), less than half of these have released any data, and for those that have, the data is often not freely accessible (Bond and Paik, 2012). For those wordnets that are avail- able, they are of widely varying size and quality, both in terms of accuracy and richness. Further, there is very little standardization in terms of for- mat, what information is included, or license. The goal of the research outlined in this paper is to make it possible for a researcher interested in working on the lexical semantics of a language or languages to be able to access wordnets for those languages with a minimum of legal and technical barriers. In practice this means making it possible to access multiple wordnets with a common inter- face. We also use sources of semi-structured data that have minimal legal restrictions to automati- cally extend existing freely available wordnets and to create additional wordnets which can be added to our open wordnet grid. Previous studies have leveraged multiple word- nets and Wiktionary (Wikimedia, 2013) to extend existing wordnets or create new ones (de Melo and Weikum, 2009; Hanoka and Sagot, 2012). These studies passed over the valuable sense groupings of translations within Wiktionary and merely used Wiktionary as a source of translations that were not disambiguated according to sense. The present study built and extended wordnets by directly link- ing Wiktionary senses to WordNet senses. Meyer and Gurevych (2011) demonstrated the ability to automatically identify many matching senses in Wiktionary and WordNet based on the similarity of monolingual features. Our …

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