WordTies: A Nordic/Baltic Multilingual Wordnet Initiative

WordTies describes a multilingual wordnet initiative embarked in the META-NORD/META-NET projects and originally concerned with the validation and pilot linking between Nordic and Baltic wordnets.

Wordnets in Nordic/Baltic countries

The builders of these wordnets have applied very different compilation strategies: The Danish and Swedish wordnets are being developed via monolingual dictionaries and corpora and subsequently linked to Princeton WordNet. In contrast, the Finnish and Norwegian wordnets are applying the expand method by translating from Princeton WordNet and the Danish wordnet, DanNet, respectively. The Estonian wordnet was built as part of the EuroWordNet project and by translating the base concepts from English as a first basis for monolingual extension.

Recently, Polish wordnet, plWordNet, has been added to WordTies. This wordnet is built using a monolingual approach similar to one used in the Danish and Swedish wordnets.

WordTies has been included as a CLARIN ERIC showcase.

Aim of multilingual wordnets

The aim of the multilingual action is to test the perspective of a multilingual linking of the Nordic and Baltic wordnets and via this (pilot) linking to perform a tentative comparison and validation of the wordnets along the measures of taxonomical structure, coverage, granularity and completeness. WordTies currently includes Danish, Finnish, Swedish, Estonian and Polish wordnets with a common, linked and searchable coverage of 1,000 core synsets (a subset of Princeton Core WordNet).

This work has been initiated within the META-NORD project which has received funding from the European Commission through the ICT PSP Programme, grant agreement no 270899. It is being extended under the CLARIN ERIC Initiative.

WordTies is developed by  Anders Johannsen and Mitchell Seaton |  GitHub