IndoWordNetPushpak Bhattacharyya, IndoWordNet, Lexical Resources Engineering Conference 2010 (LREC 2010), Malta, May, 2010. is a linked lexical knowledge base of wordnets of 18 scheduled languages of India, viz., Assamese, Bangla, Bodo, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Malayalam, Meitei (Manipuri), Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. Dravidian WordNet is a WordNet for Dravidian Languages.

Background

In early 90s, the wordnet for English- called

Princeton WordNet WordNet is a lexical database of semantic relations between words in more than 200 languages. WordNet links words into semantic relations including synonyms, hyponyms, and meronyms. The synonyms are grouped into '' synsets'' with short definiti ...

- was created in Princeton University by George Miller and Christiane Fellbaum who went on to get the prestigious Zampoli Prize in 2006. Then followed the EuroWordNet- the conglomeration of European Language wordnets- which got created in 1998. Wordnets are now essential resources for

Natural Language Processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...

, Information Extraction,

Word Sense Disambiguation Word-sense disambiguation (WSD) is the process of identifying which sense of a word is meant in a sentence or other segment of context. In human language processing and cognition, it is usually subconscious/automatic but can often come to consci ...

and such other computations involving text.

Importance of Indian languages

Indian languages form a very significant component of the languages landscape of the world. There are 4 streams of language typology operative in the Indian subcontinent- Indo European, Dravidian, Tibeto Burman and Austro Asiatic. Many languages rank within top 10 in the world in terms of the population speaking them, e.g., Hindi-Urdu 5th, Bangla 7th, Marathi 12th and so on as per the List of languages by number of native speakers. Creating wordnets of Indian languages is therefore a highly important techno-scientific and linguistic project.

Genesis of Indian language wordnets

Such project indeed took off in 2000 with Hindi WordNet being created by the

group at the Center for Indian Language Technology (CFILT) in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at

IIT Bombay The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay or IITB) is a public research university and technical institute in Powai, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. It is considered as one of the best engineering universities in India and is top ranked ...

. It was made publicly available in 2006 under the GNU license. The Hindi WordNet was created with support from the TDIL project of Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, India and also partially from Ministry of Human Resources Development, India. Wordnets of other languages of India then followed suit. The large nationwide project of building Indian language wordnets was called the IndoWordNet project. IndoWordNet is a linked lexical knowledge base of wordnets of 18 scheduled languages of India, viz., Assamese, Bangla, Bodo, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Malayalam, Meitei, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. The wordnets are getting created by using expansion approach from the Hindi WordNet. The Hindi WordNet was created from first principles (mentioned below) and was the first wordnet for an Indian language. The method adopted was the same as the

for English. Polish WordNet is being mapped to Princeton WordNet based on the strategy followed by IndoWordNet.Rudnicka, E., Maziarz, M., Piasecki, M., & Szpakowicz, S. (2012). Mapping plWordNet onto Princeton WordNet, 24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), India, December 2012

Principles of wordnet construction

The wordnets follow the principles of minimality, coverage and replaceability for the synsets. That means, there should be at least a 'core' set of lexemes in the synset that uniquely give the concept represented by the synset (minimality), e.g., standing for the concept of 'family' ("she is from a noble house"). Then the synset should cover ALL the words representing the concept in the language (coverage), e.g., the word 'ménage' will have to appear in the 'family' synset, albeit, towards the end of the synset, since its usage is rare. Finally, the words towards the beginning of the synset should be able to replace one another in reasonable amount of corpora (replaceability), e.g., 'house' and 'family' can replace each other in the sentence "she is from a noble house".

Statistics of Indian language wordnets

The number of synsets (As of August 2014) in the languages and the institutes creating the language WordNets are as below:

Summary

IndoWordNet is highly similar to EuroWordNet. However, the pivot language is Hindi which, of course, is linked to the English WordNet. Also typical Indian language phenomena like complex predicates and causative verbs are captured in IndoWordNet. IndoWordNet is publicly browsable. The Indian language wordnet building efforts forming the subcomponents of IndoWordNet project are: North East WordNet project, Dravidian WordNet Project and Indradhanush project all of which are funded by the TDIL project.

References

External links

* {{Official site, http://www.cfilt.iitb.ac.in/indowordnet/ Lexical semantics