World WordNet Database Structure: An Efficient Schema for Storing Information of WordNets of the World

Abstract

WordNet is an online lexical resource which expresses unique concepts in a language. English WordNet is the first WordNet which was developed at Princeton University. Over a period of time, many language WordNets were developed by various organizations all over the world. It has always been a challenge to store the WordNet data. Some WordNets are stored using file system and some WordNets are stored using different database models. In this paper, we present the World WordNet Database Structure which can be used to efficiently store the WordNet information of all languages of the World. This design can be adapted by most language WordNets to store information such as synset data, semantic and lexical relations, ontology details, language specific features, linguistic information, etc. An attempt is made to develop Application Programming Interfaces to manipulate the data from these databases. This database structure can help in various Natural Language Processing applications like Multilingual Information Retrieval, Word Sense Disambiguation, Machine Translation, etc.