Abstract
Hindi ranks fourth in terms of speaker’s size in the world. In spite of that, it has <0.1 % presence on web due to lack of competent lexical resources, a key reason behind digital gap due to language barrier among Indian masses. In the footsteps of the renowned lexical resource English WordNet, 18 Indian languages initiated building WordNets under the project Indo WordNet. India is a multilingual country with around 122 languages and 234 mother tongues. Many Indian languages still do not have any reliable lexical resource, and the coverage of numerous WordNets under progress is still far from average value of 25,792. The tedious manual process and high cost are major reasons behind unsatisfactory coverage and limping progress. In this paper, we discuss the socio-cultural and economic impact of providing Internet accessibility and present an approach for the automatic generation of WordNets to tackle the lack of competent lexical resources. Problems such as accuracy, association of linguistics specific gloss/example and incorrect back-translations which arise while deviating from traditional approach of compilation by lexicographers are resolved by utilising Wikipedia available for Indian languages.
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Notes
Content languages survey on 28th April, 2014: www.w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_language/all
Ethnologue Statistics for Language: www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size
Definition of Lexical Database: www-01.sil.org/linguistics/glossaryoflinguisticterms/WhatIsALexicalDatabase.htm
English Wikipedia: www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
About Hindi WordNet on 9 March 2014: www.cfilt.iitb.ac.in/wordnet/webhwn
Indo WordNet Statistics on 9 March 2014 @ 20:27:01: http://www.cfilt.iitb.ac.in/wordnet/webhwn/iwn_stats.php
Social media in fight against corruption: www.techinasia.com/social-media-played-a-major-role-in-india-fight-against-corruption/
Social media in violence against women: www.techinasia.com/social-media-played-a-major-role-in-india-fight-against-corruption/
Google Person Finder: www.google.org/personfinder/2013-uttrakhand-floods
Census of India (statement 2, statement 3, statement 8): http://censusindia.gov.in/Census_Data_2001/Census_Data_Online/Language/data_on_language.html
Article in The Hindu, 5 Jan 2014: http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-kerala/eliteracy-will-reduce-digital-divide-pm/article5540324.ece
Department of Electronics and Information Technology-IT for masses: http://deity.gov.in/content/it-masses-0
MNREGA scam in UP, 25 Feb 2014: www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/cbi-to-question-officials-for-MNREGA-scam-in-UP/
List of Wikipedia and statistics: www.meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/list_of_wikipedias
CIS-Report for Indian languages Wikipedia: http://cis-india.org/a2k/blog/indian-language-wikipedia-statistics
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Jain, A., Tayal, D.K. & Rai, S. Shrinking digital gap through automatic generation of WordNet for Indian languages. AI & Soc 30, 215–222 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-014-0548-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-014-0548-5