A Wordnet from the Ground Up

1.1. Motivation 13Affect (Strapparava and Valitutti, 2004), an additional hierarchy of “affective domainlabels” added to PWN, or WordNet Domains (Bentivogli et al., 2004), a grouping ofPWN synsets and labelling them by domain. Other resources – FrameNet (Ruppenhoferet al., 2002) and PropBank (Palmer et al., 2005) are representative examples – have beenmotivated by the intention to address PWN’s drawbacks or to add missing information(Miller and Fellbaum, 2007).Finally, PWN has inspired research projects that aim to enrich the resource itself,e.g. manually created ratings describing the strength of association between two concepts(represented by two synsets) (Boyd-Graber et al., 2006) or the enrichment ofPWN with folk knowledge and stereotypes (Veale and Hao, 2008).The growing amount of research carried out on wordnets, based on wordnets anddone around wordnets has inspired the organisation of the First Global Wordnet Conference[GWC] (Mysore, India) supported by the Global WordNet Association (GWA,2008a) [GWA]. There ensued a series of successful biennial conferences. Workshopsand sessions dedicated to wordnets and their applications take place at larger conferences.Seven events are listed on the GWA Web page (GWA, 2008a); others includethe “Workshop on Usage of WordNet in Natural Language Processing Systems” duringCOLING/ACL’98 or “WordNet Special Track” during Language and TechnologyConference in 2007.Google Scholar 5 returned (on June 6, 2009) 4217 citations for (Fellbaum, 1998c)and 1336 for (Miller et al., 1990). There are thousands of citations to less wellreferencedPWN-related papers.1.1.4 Wordnets out thereThe seminal project EuroWordnet (EWN) (Vossen, 2002) was initiated in 1996. TheEWN project was aimed at developing wordnets for a number European languages,first Dutch, Italian and Spanish (PWN already covered English), and then Czech,Estonian, French and German. All wordnets were mutually aligned via the mediatingmapping into Inter-Lingual Index introduced by the EWN project. Its records consistof an English synset, an English gloss that specifies the meaning and a reference to itssource – to a synset in PWN 1.5. An upper-level ontology called Top Ontology, linkedto Inter-Lingual Index, was also introduced in order to “to provide a common frameworkfor the most important concepts in all the wordnets” (Vossen, 2002, p. 10). Thisorientation on the construction of aligned wordnets influenced the methods developedin EWN. We will return to this issue in Section 1.3.1.The BalkaNet project (Tufiş et al., 2004) inherited the main assumptions and solutionsfrom EWN. BalkaNet covered Bulgarian, Greek, Romanian, Serbian and Turkish,5 http://scholar.google.com