Experiences in building the Konkani WordNet using the expansion approach

Abstract

WordNet can be described as an electronic lexical database available on-line as a powerful resource to the researchers in the area of computational linguistics, text processing and many other related areas. Currently, the necessity of building WordNets has been felt for all the Indian Languages to aid in multi lingual machine translation and cross lingual information retrieval to promote tourism, farming, education and other related areas for overall growth and development of the nation. IIT Bombay, India has developed a number of tools, resources and facilities by which WordNet of any language can be constructed through what is known as the expansion approach. Projects to create WordNet in most of the Indian languages using this approach with Hindi WordNet as the base are currently in progress. In this paper we report our experiences of creating a WordNet for Konkani language using the expansion approach with Hindi as the source language and Konkani as the target language. The Konkani WordNet is in the initial stage of development. The 1969 Hindi core synsets have been incorporated in the Konkani WordNet. The Offline Synset Linking Tool developed by IIT Bombay is being used for this task.