Merging a Syntactic Resource with a WordNet: a Feasibility Study of a Merge between STO and DanNet

AbstractThis paper presents a feasibility study of a merge between SprogTeknologisk Ordbase (STO), which contains morphological and syntactic information, and DanNet, which is a Danish WordNet containing semantic information in terms of synonym sets and semantic relations. The aim of the merge is to develop a richer, composite resource which we believe will have a broader usage perspective than the two seen in isolation. In STO, the organizing principle is based on the observable syntactic features of a lemma’s near context (labeled syntactic units or SynUs). In contrast, the basic unit in DanNet is constituted by semantic senses or - in wordnet terminology - synonym sets (synsets). The merge of the two resources is thus basically to be understood as a linking between SynUs and synsets. In the paper we discuss which parts of the merge can be performed semi-automatically and which parts require manual linguistic matching procedures. We estimate that this manual work will amount to approx. 39% of the lexicon material.