Abstract
This paper is a contribution to the discussion on compiling computational lexical resources from conventional dictionaries. It describes the theoretical as well as practical problems that are encountered when reusing a conventional dictionary for compiling a lexical-semantic resource in terms of a wordnet. More specifically, it describes the methodological issues of compiling a wordnet for Danish, DanNet, from a monolingual basis, and not—as is often seen—by applying the translational expansion method with Princeton WordNet as the English source. Thus, we apply as our basis a large, corpus-based printed dictionary of modern Danish. Using this approach, we discuss the issues of readjusting inconsistent and/or underspecified hyponymy hierarchies taken from the conventional dictionary, sense distinctions as opposed to the synonym sets of wordnets, generating semantic wordnet relations on the basis of sense definitions, and finally, supplementing missing or implicit information.
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Notes
Actually, Ruus (1995: 130) argues that some of these hyponyms are characterised by the fact that a limited set of features can distinguish them from each other. She uses Grandy’s terminology and calls such hyponyms contrast sets.
It should be made clear that multiple inheritance is also rather frequent with 1st Order Entities. For instance, in the previously mentioned example of grøntsag (vegetable) several vegetables are encoded partly with plante (plant) or plantedel (part of plant) as hypernym, partly with grøntsag as hypernym.
‘Domain’ is an ontological type that has been inserted by DanNet (not EWN ontology). Such additions are given in cases where large groups of synsets call for a more specific ontological type than what is given by the EuroWordNet Ontology. Another example of a DanNet extension of the ontology is the ontological type BodyPart.
A more detailed account of this is given in Asmussen (2007).
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Pedersen, B.S., Nimb, S., Asmussen, J. et al. DanNet: the challenge of compiling a wordnet for Danish by reusing a monolingual dictionary. Lang Resources & Evaluation 43, 269–299 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-009-9092-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-009-9092-1