WordNet for Hebrew

Project description

Objective: To create a Hebrew WordNet, aligned with the Princeton English WordNet.

Researchers: In Haifa, Noam Ordan, Iris Eyal, Margalit Zabludowski and Shuly Wintner. This project is joint with a team at the TCC Division ITC-IRST (now FBK), Trento, Italy.

Status: Complete

Funding: Israeli Ministry of Science and Technology, as part of the Knowledge Center for Hebrew Language Telecommunication.

Abstract

WordNet is an online lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying lexical concept. Different relations link the synonym sets. 

Following the success of the English WordNet, similar networks have been developed for a variety of languages. In particular, researchers at ITC-IRST in Trento, Italy have developed a methodology for parallel development of multilingual WordNets. The system, called MultiWordNet, contains information on several aspects of multilingual dictionaries, including lexical relationships between words, semantic relations over lexical concepts, several mappings of lexical concepts in different languages etc. 

MultiWordNet has a variety of applications, including:

• Information retrieval: lexical relations can significantly improve the performance of query answering systems, for example; multilingual relationships facilitate multilingual information extraction and retrieval.

• Semantic annotation: since words in the network are tagged by the semantic concepts to which to relate, a multilingual WordNet can be used for semantic annotation and classification of texts.

• Disambiguation: semantic relationships can assist in determining the semantic distance between words and concepts, thereby assisting in lexical disambiguation.

• Terminology: the system can be used for developing structured terminologies for specific applications.

Our goal in this project is to use the MultiWordNet methodology in order to construct a Hebrew WordNet, aligned with the one developed at IRST (and, therefore, aligned with English, Italian and Spanish).

Resources

Download the Hebrew network. Access to and use of these products is governed by a license.

Publications

• Noam Ordan and Shuly Wintner. Hebrew WordNet: a test case of aligning lexical databases across languages. International Journal of Translation 19(1):39-58, 2007.

• Noam Ordan and Shuly Wintner. Representing natural gender in multilingual lexical databases. International Journal of Lexicography 18(3):357-370, September 2005.