Automatically constructing Wordnet synsets

TL;DR

This paper presents methods for automatically constructing Wordnet synsets for various languages by translating and ranking synsets from existing Wordnets using machine translation and bilingual dictionaries.

Contribution

It introduces algorithms that leverage existing Wordnets, machine translation, and bilingual dictionaries to generate synsets in resource-rich and resource-poor languages.

Findings

Effective translation of synsets across languages

Applicable to any language with a bilingual dictionary

Reduces manual effort in Wordnet construction

Abstract

Manually constructing a Wordnet is a difficult task, needing years of experts' time. As a first step to automatically construct full Wordnets, we propose approaches to generate Wordnet synsets for languages both resource-rich and resource-poor, using publicly available Wordnets, a machine translator and/or a single bilingual dictionary. Our algorithms translate synsets of existing Wordnets to a target language T, then apply a ranking method on the translation candidates to find best translations in T. Our approaches are applicable to any language which has at least one existing bilingual dictionary translating from English to it.