A Wordnet from the Ground Up

28 Chapter 2. Building a Wordnet Coregirl ↔ boy or girlfriend ↔ boyfriend. That is to say, the relation should be eitherantonymy or conversion. It was therefore essential to create two LUs: dziewczyna 1‘girl’ and dziewczyna 2 ‘girlfriend’.2.2.2 Hyponymy/hypernymy and troponymyThe central hyponymy/hypernymy relation shapes the hierarchical structure of the lexicon.It mandates the formation of long superclass-subclass paths. One small examplewill illustrate: animal → dog → poodle → toy poodle. The relation is prevalentamong nouns, especially where it comes to representing natural types and role types.Let us offer a detailed analysis of one “family” of concepts. Roślina ‘plant’ has organism‘organism’ as a hypernym, and several hyponyms: krzew ‘bush’, drzewo ‘tree’,trawa ‘grass’, glon ‘alga’, alga ‘alga’ (the last two are synonyms) and roślina uprawna‘cultivated plant’. Most of these hyponyms have their own hyponyms. Thus, roślinauprawna ‘cultivated plant’ includes zboże ‘cereal’ and warzywo ‘vegetable’. The latterhas hyponyms such as por ‘leek’, kapusta ‘cabbage’ and ziemniak, kartofel, pyra,grul, all four meaning ‘potato’. The same goes for drzewo ‘a tree’: its hyponymsinclude drzewo iglaste ‘conifer’ and drzewo liściaste ‘deciduous’, each with numeroushyponyms.In plWordNet, hyponymy/hypernymy also holds among verbs. For example, okazywaćuczucia ‘express one’s feelings’ has the following hyponyms: wzruszyć się ‘bemoved’, uśmiechnąć się ‘smile’, zabawiać się ‘divert oneself’, rechotać ‘chortle’, śmiaćsię ‘laugh’, tulić uszy ‘back down (literally fold one’s ears)’, ucieszyć się ‘rejoice’, wylaćłzy ‘shed tears’, wyśmiewać się ‘mock’, złościć się ‘be angry’, zezłościć się ‘get angry’and zdziwić się ‘be surprised’.Hyponymy among verbs in PWN is identified with the troponymy relation, andforms a symmetrical pair with hypernymy. Troponymy is “a manner relation”, withthe following description in Fellbaum (1998b, p. 79):To V 1 is to V 2 in some particular manner.In EWN (Vossen, 2002), troponymy was replaced with hyponymy among verbs. We seea place for both relations. Verbs which describe the manner of action, such as mówić‘speak’ ← jąkać się ‘stammer’, are linked by troponymy. Here are other examples oftroponymy: iść ‘walk’ is linked in plWordNet with kroczyć ‘stride’ and leźć ‘trudge,shamble’; przykrywać ‘cover’ with pokrywać ‘coat’ and okrywać ‘wrap (in)’; and brać‘take’ with zabierać ‘take away’. It must be noticed that the relation is not symmetrical.While ‘trudge, shamble’ can be paraphrased as ‘walk in certain way’, it would be wrongto describe iść in the same way with respect to leźć.The majority of Polish troponyms are morphological derivatives created by a setof prefix morphemes from their hypernyms as their derivative bases (Derwojedowa