Abstract
Wordnets are large-scale lexical databases of related words and concepts, useful for language-aware software applications. They have recently been built for many languages by using various approaches. The Finnish wordnet, FinnWordNet (FiWN), was created by translating the more than 200,000 word senses in the English Princeton WordNet (PWN) 3.0 in 100 days. To ensure quality, they were translated by professional translators. The direct translation approach was based on the assumption that most synsets in PWN represent language-independent real-world concepts. Thus also the semantic relations between synsets were assumed mostly language-independent, so the structure of PWN could be reused as well. This approach allowed the creation of an extensive Finnish wordnet directly aligned with PWN and also provided us with a translation relation and thus a bilingual wordnet usable as a dictionary. In this paper, we address several concerns raised with regard to our approach, many of them for the first time. We evaluate the craftsmanship of the translators by checking the spelling and translation quality, the viability of the approach by assessing the synonym quality both on the lexeme and concept level, as well as the usefulness of the resulting lexical resource both for humans and in a language-technological task. We discovered no new problems compared with those already known in PWN. As a whole, the paper contributes to the scientific discourse on what it takes to create a very large wordnet. As a side-effect of the evaluation, we extended FiWN to contain 208,645 word senses in 120,449 synsets, effectively making version 2.0 of FiWN currently the largest wordnet in the world by these statistics.
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Notes
The full FiWN can be downloaded from http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/en/lt/research/finnwordnet/.
For information on the availability and size of various wordnets, see Bond and Paik (2012) and Open Multilingual Wordnet, http://casta-net.jp/~kuribayashi/multi/.
The figure excludes the suggestions for additional synonyms and “not sure” answers.
“Equally frequent” meant that the words in FiWN had an average frequency in the text corpus and that we used all the words in the text corpus with a least a quarter of this average frequency.
Two translators working in parallel spent 100 calendar days full-time translating PWN word senses into Finnish, so the translation effort took six person months in total.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Mirka Hyvärinen, Kristiina Muhonen and Paula Pääkkä for checking the long lists of words with potential spelling errors and part-of-speech mismatches. We also thank Mirka Hyvärinen and Pinja Pennala for their valuable contribution to the creation of the word-sense disambiguated test corpus and for the many hours spent on evaluating sets of words extracted from Wikipedia and Wiktionary. Mirka Hyärinen also conducted the crowdsourcing experiment. This work was funded by the FIN-CLARIN and META-NORD projects. The META-NORD project has received funding from the European Union’s ICT Policy Support Programme as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme under grant agreement no. 270899.
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Lindén, K., Niemi, J. Is it possible to create a very large wordnet in 100 days? An evaluation. Lang Resources & Evaluation 48, 191–201 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-013-9245-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-013-9245-0