The Japanese Wordnet and the Open Multilingual Wordnet

Mon, 16:20–17:50, Classroom 013 (Faculty of Arts)

(slides | browse the wordnets)

Abstract

For many years, people have used lexical graphs of semantic relations — such as synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, and meronymy — to encode lexical meaning. In this talk I will introduce the Japanese wordnet, a large scale, freely available, semantic dictionary of Japanese.

The Japanese WordNet was originally developed at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in 2006, to support Natural Language Processing research in Japan. The first version (0.9) was released in February 2009. It is currently maintained by an international team. As the first step in compiling the Japanese WordNet, we added Japanese equivalents to synsets of the Princeton WordNet. Currently we have added many synsets which do not exist in the Princeton WordNet, and modified the structure of the hierarchy, in order to make it better represent the Japanese language.

Finally, I show how research on Japanese led us to build the Open Multilingual Wordnet.

Note: This is work done with Takayuki Kuribayashi and many, many others.

Readings/Preparation

Francis Bond and Kyonghee Paik (2012)

A survey of wordnets and their licenses. In Proceedings of the 6th Global WordNet Conference (GWC 2012). Matsue. 64–71.

Francis Bond, Piek Vossen, John McCrae, and Christiane Fellbaum (2016)

CILI: the Collaborative Interlingual Index. In Proceedings of the 8th Global WordNet Conference (GWC2016), Bucharest. pp 50–57.

Francis Bond and Christiane Fellbaum (2024)

The Open Multilingual Wordnet 2.0. In Proceedings of the 12th Global WordNet Conference (GWC2024).