A Wordnet from the Ground Up

4.5. Hybrid Combinations 155suggested fruit and vegetable names (morela ‘apricot’ or pietruszka ‘parsnip’), namesof spices (tymianek ‘thyme’) or alcohols (rum ‘rum’) as direct or indirect hyponymsof the appropriate existing nodes (food, plant, spice, alcohol).Graph reconstruction did not always work so well. Occasionally, it resulted insuggested link between nouns that were unexpected (papużka ‘budgerigar’ → chomik‘hamster’ or delfin ‘dolphin’ → rybka ‘little fish’) or even random. The system wasless helpful for large of general domains such as person or place names – misses weremore frequent in such cases 16 . Sometimes LUs were linked quite accurately, but notby hyponymy/hypernymy or synonymy. Instead, the relation was either meronymy (forexample, among nouns denoting body parts), fuzzynymy or (less often) relatedness.Let us note that WNW sometimes also served as a tool for discovering errors inthe wordnet. For example, the unit rój ‘hive, colony’ was inappropriately linked withthe synset grupa ludzi ‘a group of people’. The hypernymy tree was missing a nodefor a group of animals, present in the database but not linked by hyponymy/hypernymywith other LUs from the same semantic field. Similarly, the mislinked LU holiday (withhyponyms Saturday and Sunday) pointed to poorly arranged relations in the synset day:workday (with hyponyms Monday through Friday) complements holiday. Incompletehyponym/hypernym trees were also identified. For example, the mislinked new lemmaKoran ‘The Koran’ showed the absence in plWordNet of the hypernym (holy scriptures)as well as co-hyponyms (The Bible). A completely haphazard placement of the unitpartykuła ‘particle’ helped uncover the absence of part of speech, noun, verb, adjective,and so on.ExamplesFigures 4.9–4.16 show examples of WNW’s suggestions. The very accurate attachmentpoint (not only the area) suggested for nikiel ‘nickel’ exemplifies WNW’s very goodperformance in such domains like chemical substances and elements, plants or animals.Those are domains of a taxonomical character, but are also well described by thepatterns run on the joint corpus. We show in WNW all synsets from a connectedsubgraph that received a positive score in relation to the subject LU, but only the localmaximum (a synset marked by the blue border) is the final singular attachment point.The whole subgraph represents the attachment area.16 This subjective observation comes from the linguist who worked with WNW. It has been partiallycontradicted by the statistical data recorded in the database that registered the linguist’s every decision.The data show that the most hits at the level of new lemmas was observed in the domain of persons, sothe observation may have been caused by the lower number of direct hits in this domain. This exampleis a good illustration of possible discrepancies between objective statistically-based evaluation and theusability of a tool for the users.