DanNet: the challenge of compiling a wordnet for Danish by reusing a monolingual dictionary

Abstract

This paper is a contribution to the discussion on compiling computational lexical resources from conventional dictionaries. It describes the theoretical as well as practical problems that are encountered when reusing a conventional dictionary for compiling a lexical-semantic resource in terms of a wordnet. More specifically, it describes the methodological issues of compiling a wordnet for Danish, DanNet, from a monolingual basis, and not-as is often seen-by applying the translational expansion method with Princeton WordNet as the English source. Thus, we apply as our basis a large, corpus-based printed dictionary of modern Danish. Using this approach, we discuss the issues of readjusting inconsistent and/or underspecified hyponymy hierarchies taken from the conventional dictionary, sense distinctions as opposed to the synonym sets of wordnets, generating semantic wordnet relations on the basis of sense definitions, and finally, supplementing missing or implicit information.

Lexical platform – the first step towards user-centred integration of lexical resources

“…Implementations of RDF for wordnets were proposed, but used only for single wordnets, e.g. Princeton WordNet (PWN) (Fellbaum, 1998) and DanNet (Pedersen, Nimb, Asmussen, Sørensen, Trap-Jensen, & Lorentzen, 2009). Several implementations of Lexical Markup Framework (LMF), a generic ISO standard, were proposed for wordnets, e.g.…”

Towards the Multilingual Semantic Web

“…The server currently includes English (Fellbaum 1998); Albanian (Ruci 2008); Arabic (Black et al 2006); Chinese (Huang et al 2010;Wang and Bond 2013); Danish (Pedersen et al 2009); Finnish (Lindén and Carlson 2010); French (Sagot and Fišer 2008); Hebrew (Ordan and Wintner 2007); Indonesian and Malaysian (Nurril Hirfana et al 2011);Italian (Pianta et al 2002); Japanese (Isahara et al 2008);Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk: Lars Nygaard 2012, p.c. ); Persian (Montazery and Faili 2010); Polish (Piasecki et al 2009); Portuguese (de Paiva and Rademaker 2012); Thai (Thoongsup et al 2009); and Basque, Catalan, Galician, and Spanish from the Multilingual Common Repository (Gonzalez-Agirre et al 2012).…”

The chicken-and-egg problem in wordnet design: synonymy, synsets and constitutive relations

“…The nature and granularity of contexts is left to intuition. Such synset definitions-with varying wording-are common in wordnets, and they all fall short (Pedersen et al 2009;Tufiş et al 2004;Koeva et al 2004). …”

“…Most wordnets appear to choose only a few relations to act as constitutive wordnet relations: hyponymy / hypernymy, meronymy / holonymy and synonymy (Miller et al 1990;Vossen 2002;Hamp and Feldweg 1997;Koeva et al 2004;Pedersen et al 2009;Piasecki et al 2009). Miller (1998, p. 40) calls all of them except synonymy ''fundamental organizing relations''.…”