WordNet Enhancements:Toward Version 2.0

• WordNet Connectivity

• Derivational Connections

• Disambiguated Definitions

• Topical Connections

WordNet Connectivity

• WordNet is a lexical database of English nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs

• Entries are lexicalized concepts that consist of one or more synonyms, a definitional gloss, and links to semantically related entries

• Links are to antonyms, superordinates, parts, entailments

• WordNet contains 133,000 different word-forms that are organized in 111,000 different entries

WordNet• WN is a lexical database for English nouns,

verbs, adjectives, and adverbs

• A WN entry is a concept consisting of one or more synonyms, a definitional gloss, and two-way semantic links to related entries

• Links are to antonyms, subordinates, parts, entailments

• WN now contains 138,000 word-forms that are organized into 111,000 entries

Derivational Connections• WordNet is widely used for computational

linguistics although there are no links between morphologically related nouns and verbs

• There is no link from digest to digestion so stemming is required to relate “he digested the food” and “his digestion of the food”

• It is proposed to add links between morpho-semantically related nouns and verbs

Derivational Relations

• Homographs: noun and verb have the same spelling: foil

• Deverbal Nouns: noun is derived from a verb: demonstration from demonstrate

• Denominal Verbs: verb is derived from a noun: motivate from motive

• Miscellaneous: grow and growth

Ambiguity

• Demonstrate and demonstration both have more than one meaning

• Links must be inserted between meanings that match: demonstrate meaning ‘to protest publicly’ should NOT link to demonstration meaning ‘a proof by argument or inference’

• Approximately 20,00 links are required

Disambiguated Definitions

• Each WN entry has a definitional gloss

• The words in a gloss can be ambiguous

• To disambiguate the glosses, two-way links will be inserted manually between the word in the gloss and its context-appropriate meaning in WN

• More than 500,000 links will be required

Topical Connections

• Topical access to WN will be provided by creating lists of lexicalized concepts that frequently co-occur in discussions of a given topic

• Some WordNet entries contain references to specialized topics (astronomy, law, music, etc.) which will be linked to the appropriate WN entries

Topical Connections (cont.)

• Once the glosses are disambiguated, all the entries associated with a topic can be found by searching the glosses for synonym sets in which the disambiguated name of the topic occurs

• Users should be able to customize WN for topics of special interest to them