A Wordnet from the Ground Up

1.3. Early Decisions 214. On the other hand, some Polish LUs have no English lexical equivalents 14 :brodacz ‘bearded man’, doczytać ‘to read to the end’, płaskodenny ‘with a flatbottom’, walizeczka ‘small suitcase’. We decided, therefore, to describe thelexicalisation and conceptualization in Polish as accurately as possible. Webelieve that it is much more interesting to compare two wordnets that reflect thereal nature of two natural languages than to create a hybrid, which in fact wouldbe just an English wordnet mechanically translated into Polish.In addition to opting for the merge model, we made several more detailed decisionsfor plWordNet.• Synonymy, antonymy, hypernymy and meronymy hold between LUs of the samemorphosyntactic class – nouns, adjectives or verbs; this is the basic assumptionin PWN and EWN.• Relations are divided into two subclasses: those linking synsets and those linkingLUs; this was the most erroneous decision of all (Sections 2.1, 2.4), althoughit strictly followed the practice in previous wordnets. We backed away for thepurposes of linguistic work before it even started, but the decision affected theapplication that supported wordnet construction (Section 2.4).• Meronymy is divided into six subclasses, following EWN.• Due to the strong potential of Polish lexical derivation, some relations wereadded or redefined to cover the most frequent or regular phenomena (Sections2.2.4 and 2.2).• Because we cannot add glosses to the entries in the databases, we decided todefine an entry as a certain graphical string with a net of relations representingmeaning; in consequence polysemy increased (Chapter 5.2).14 Naturally it is possible to employ a syntactic structure to express in another language approximatelythe same sense as the lexicalised term has, it just would not be a lexeme and not even an idiom.