# Etytree: A Graphical and Interactive Etymology Dictionary Based on Wiktionary

Ester Pantaleo, Vito Walter Anelli, Tommaso Di Noia, Gilles Serasset

► To cite this version:

Ester Pantaleo, Vito Walter Anelli, Tommaso Di Noia, Gilles Serasset. Etytree: A Graphical and Interactive Etymology Dictionary Based on Wiktionary. 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion, 2017, Perth, Australia. pp.1635–1640, 10.1145/3041021.3053365. hal-01511911

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Submitted on 6 Jun 2018

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Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
# Etytree: A Graphical and Interactive Etymology Dictionary
## Based on Wiktionary

Ester Pantaleo

Wikimedia Foundation grantee
Italy

Vito Walter Anelli

Politecnico di Bari
Italy

esterpantaleo@gmail.com

vitowalter.anelli@poliba.it

Tommaso Di Noia

Politecnico di Bari
Italy

Gilles Sérasset

Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS
Grenoble INP, LIG, F-38000
Grenoble, France

tommaso.dinoia@poliba.it

gilles.serasset@imag.fr

## ABSTRACT

We present etytree (from etymology + family tree): a new on-line multilingual tool to extract and visualize etymological relationships between words from the English Wiktionary. A first version of etytree is available at http://tools.wmflabs.org/etytree/.

With etytree users can search a word and interactively explore etymologically related words (ancestors, descendants, cognates) in many languages using a graphical interface. The data is synchronised with the English Wiktionary dump at every new release, and can be queried via SPARQL from a Virtuoso endpoint.

Etytree is the first graphical etymology dictionary, which could be used to search specific etymological definitions as well as to discover new relations among words. Moreover, it can be effectively adopted by Wiktionary editors to identify inconsistencies or missing information in the data.

## Keywords

etymology; Wiktionary; natural language processing; d3.js

## 1. INTRODUCTION

Etytree is a new tool to extract and visualize etymological relationships between lexemes (or words, for simplicity) using data coming from the English Wiktionary. The interest of this tool lies in its potential for Wiktionary users, editors and for researchers or more generally people interested in languages and etymologies.

It is built on top of DBnary[1] which extracts word Definitions, Parts of Speech, Synonyms, and other lexical information from Wiktionary pages. Etytree extends DBnary with

a new method<fnref n="1" /> that parses Etymology, Derived terms, Descendants sections, the namespace for Reconstructed Terms, and the etymtree template in Wiktionary.

With etytree, a RDF (Resource Description Framework) lexical database of etymological relationships collecting all the extracted relationships and lexical data attached to lexemes has also been released. The database consists of triples or data entities composed of subject-predicate-object where a possible statement can be (for example) a triple with a lexeme as subject, a lexeme as object, and “derivesFrom” or “etymologicallyEquivalentTo” as predicate. The RDF database has been exposed via a SPARQL endpoint and can be queried at http://etytree-virtuoso.wmflabs.org/sparql.

Etytree provides a graphical interface to the database which consists in an intuitive and multilingual graphical etymology dictionary. The graphical etymology dictionary represents the extracted etymological relationships as well as the associated lexical information using graphs and tooltips, respectively. It uses d3.js<fnref n="2" />, a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data, and infers the tree structure from the RDF database on the fly through specific queries from the Virtuoso<fnref n="3" /> SPARQL endpoint.

With etytree, users can discover new words when they search for a specific etymological definition, e.g., they can discover words that derive from the same ancestral word, both in their own language and in other languages. This happens in an intuitive way without having to read fairly long and complex sentences that describe etymological relationships between words and without the need to navigate across multiple Wiktionary pages. Moreover, with the visualization of the etymological tree, editors can easily spot inconsistencies between etymological relationships described across multiple Wiktionary pages. Finally, researchers can use the database of etymological relationships to study etymologies on a large scale. Potentially, they could extend the database of etymological relationships to include semantics or pronunciations, to study how they evolved through time across etymological trees and across languages.

©2017 International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2), published under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 License.
WWW'17 Companion, April 3-7, 2017, Perth, Australia.
ACM 978-1-4503-4913-0/17/04.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3038912.3038914

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>

<footnote n="1">¹The extended version of DBnary is available at https://bitbucket.org/esterpantaleo/dbnary_etymology</footnote>

<footnote n="2">²https://d3js.org/</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³https://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1: A screenshot of the interactive visualization produced by etytree for the English word “gorgeous”. From the graph it is possible to see that the English words “gorgeous”, “disgorge”, “gorget”, and archaic words “gorge” and “engorge” are etymologically related.</figcaption></figure>
<table><tr><td>Entry</td><td>Discussion</td><td>Citations</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>Read</td><td>Edit</td><td>History</td><td>More</td></tr><tr><td colspan="4">Search Wiktionary</td><td><img src="icon.png" alt="Search icon"></td></tr></table>

News for editors

[dismiss]

gorgeous

**Contents** [hide]

1 English

1.1 Etymology

1.2 Pronunciation

1.3 Adjective

1.3.1 Translations

1.3.2 Synonyms

1.3.3 Derived terms

1.3.4 See also

English [edit]

Etymology [edit]

From Early Modern English *gorgious*, *gorgeouse*, from Middle French *gorgias* ("elegant, fashionable"), from Old French *gourgias*, *gorgias* ("gorgeous, gaudy, flaunting, gallant, fine"), of uncertain formation, but apparently connected with Old French *gorgias* ("a gorget, ruffle for the neck"), from Old French *gorge* ("bosom, throat"). See gorge. Sense evolution was probably that of "swelling of the throat or bosom due to pride, bridling up" to "assume an air of importance, flaunting".

<caption>Figure 2: A screenshot of the English entry “gorgeous” in the English Wiktionary</caption>
stay out for months before scarcity of food causes them to find their way home in the autumn for feeding.

we propose to add template (for example {{detailed etymology}}) before long descriptive etymologies that don't have a standard chain of etymological relationships which would signal to the extraction algorithm to ignore that section.

In the current version, *etytree* parses links like [[cattle]] in the Etymology section above as an ancestor of "*until the cows come home*" and therefore infers an incorrect etymological relationship. We decided to keep those links for now, as we hope that editors will fix those entries and set a clear standard in the structure of Etymology sections.

## 2.2 Derived terms sections

Derived terms sections are pretty standard with some exceptions. Below we copy the Derived terms section of English "gorgeous", which is representative of how Derived terms sections are usually structured:

=====Derived terms=====

* {{|en|gorgeously}}

* {{|en|gorgeousness}}

## 2.3 Descendants sections

Descendants sections also are written in a standard way (with some exceptions). Below we copy the (beginning of the) Descendants section of Latin "aqua":

=====Descendants=====

* Eastern:

** Aromanian: l|rup|apă

** Istro-Romanian: l|ruo|ăpe

** Megleno-Romanian: l|ruq|apu

** Romanian: l|ro|apă

* Franco-Provençal: l|frp|àiva

* Gallo-Italian:

** Emilian: l|egl|âcua

** Ligurian: l|lij|aigua, l|lij|ægoa

** Lombard: l|lmo|acqua, l|lmo|ègua

** Piedmontese: l|pms|eva

** Romagnol: l|rgn|aqua, l|rgn|acva

** Venetian: l|vec|aqua

## 2.4 Appendix with reconstructed words

Reconstructed terms are words, roots, or phrases that are not attested but have been reconstructed by linguists and are conventionally identified with an initial asterisk. They are defined in the namespace Reconstruction (see for example entry "h₂kʷeh₂" defined at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/h%E2%82%82%2C3%A9k%CA%B7eh%E2%82%82%82) and are structured similarly to regular Wiktionary entries.

## 2.5 etymtree template

The *etymtree* template is a template used in Wiktionary to describe etymological trees and reflects the structure of the Descendants sections.

## 3. THE DATABASE

The database is installed on the Wikimedia Labs, the *Wikimedia Foundation's* cloud computing environment. It is managed by *Virtuoso version 07.20.3217* on Linux.

The extracted database consists of 6 million distinct entries (6023380) in 3365 languages, with Latin having the highest number of entries (around 13% or 806999 entries), followed by English (9% or 547506), Italian (8.5% or 515059), Spanish (7% or 419889), Russian (5.5% or 331798), French (5% or 305973), Portuguese (4% or 244784), German (3% or 185520).

With appropriate queries to the SPARQL endpoint we can ask interesting questions.

For example, we can ask which languages English words derive from. The extracted English words derive mostly from other English words (2702), Middle English words (1152), Latin words (1116), French words (832), Old French words (715). Italian words derive mostly from Latin words (1132), Italian words (457), Spanish words (358), French words (147), Greek words (118). French words derive mostly from Latin words (2190), Middle French (1185), Old French (995), French (982), Italian words (584).

We can also ask *Virtuoso* to list the most connected entries. The most connected entries are affixes, namely English "-ly" (7070 connections), "non-" (6900 connections), "un-" (6873), "-ness" (5312). The most connected French affix is "-ment" (2573). Hungarian "-ok-" (2054), "-ek-" (1809), "-k-" (1821) and Italian "-mente" (2035), "-ità" (1670) are the most connected affixes in their respective languages.

The most connected entries that are not affixes are English lemmas "man" (353 connections), "back" (303), "head" (290), followed by "work", "house", "wood", "land", "line". These highly connected nodes slow down queries launched by the visualization tool. We are currently working on the design of more efficient queries given the available data.

## 4. CONCLUSIONS

We have presented *etytree*, a tool to visualize etymological relationships between words in the form of a connected graph. The tool is currently under development but a first working release is available at http://tools.wmflabs.org/etytree/etymology/resources/html/index.html.

This tool can be a valuable resource for people that are interested in the history of words or words in general as they can discover new words in other languages that are etymologically related to the searched words, as well as for etymology enthusiasts, as they can explore etymological relationships in a completely new way. Also we believe that the database can be a valuable resource for linguists as they can study etymologies on a much larger scale.

Because of its nature, we believe this work will attract new users to Wiktionary and will improve as well as increase its content. We also believe it will encourage Wiktionary editors to use more standard rules to format etymologies. We hope that this project will help to turn the whole Wiktionary into a machine readable resource with the minimum possible loss of information.

Because of the complexity of the original data contained in Wiktionary (especially the complexity of Etymology sections) the extracted database contains some incorrect entries. We hope that users will contribute to Wiktionary to spot those inconsistencies. We would like to work together with them to improve even more Wiktionary Etymology sections and to improve *etytree* simultaneously.
The project has the potential to grow in both content and quality as it is open source and relies on data coming from a collaborative and multilingual resource as *Wiktionary*.

## 5. FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS

As the structure of etymological trees (or graphs) is language independent, this project could be extended to use etymological relationships described in other language versions of *Wiktionary*, although Etymology sections seem rather incomplete/informal in other languages (Russian might be the next target language).

In addition, as the textual part of the tree (definition of words, language tags, etc.) can be exported from different language versions of *Wiktionary*, this tool can easily become available in different languages, thus considerably extending its scope.

Last, this tool can be integrated into *Wikidata* when the *Wikidata-for-Wiktionary*<fnref n="10" /> proposal turns into production.

## 6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work is supported by the *Wikimedia Foundation* through an IEG grant<fnref n="11" /> to Ester Pantaleo. We would like to thank the *Wiktionary* and the *Wikidata* communities for their help and for their precious work.

## 7. AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Ester Pantaleo conceived the idea and developed the tool, Tommaso Di Noia contributed to the research project with monthly meetings, Gilles Sérasset helped integration with *DBnary* and provided some computational resources, Vito Walter Anelli helped formulating appropriate queries to the *Virtuoso DBMS*. Everyone participated in the writing of this paper.

### References

[1] S. Gilles. Dbnary: Wiktionary as a lemon-based multilingual lexical resource in rdf. *Semantic Web Journal - Special Issue on Multilingual Linked Open Data*, 6(4): 355-361, 2015.

[2] G. de Melo. Proc. lrec. ELRA, Paris, France, 2014.

[3] G. de Melo and G. Weikum. Proceedings of the 5th global wordnet conference (gwc 2010). Narosa Publishing, New Delhi India, 2010.

<footnote n="10">¹⁰https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata: Wiktionary/Development/Proposals/2015-05</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/A-graphical_and_interactive_etymology_dictionary_based_on_Wiktionary</footnote>