Introduction to P roverb N et: An Online Multilingual Database of Proverbs and Comprehensive Metadata (2021)

Abstract: Proverbs are unique linguistic expressions used by humans in the process of communication. They are frozen expressions and have the capacity to convey deep semantic aspects of a given language. This paper describes ProverbNet, a novel online multilingual database of proverbs and comprehensive metadata equipped with a multipurpose search engine to store, explore, understand, classify and analyze proverbs and their metadata. ProverbNet has immense applications including machine translation, cognitive studies and learning tools. We have 2320 Sanskrit Proverbs and 1136 Marathi proverbs and their metadata in ProverbNet and are adding more proverbs in different languages to the network.

## introduction according to @xcite , proverbs are selfcontained, didactic linguistic units, and their content is usually fixed and poetic. proverbs contain the same words as ordinary sentences, but are frozen expressions and have a noncompositional meaning, created by humans and handed down through generations @xcite . proverbs can be used to present facts, refer to human socio-cultural events, give advice, and critique behavior @xcite . understanding of metaphorical ideas and a priori knowledge is essential for getting from the literal meaning of the proverb to its hidden and intended meaning. the crucial task of machine translation fails to translate proverbs because of the inability to detect proverbs automatically and incorrectness of direct translation. as proverbs are just like any other sentences, it is difficult to detect them in textual corpus automatically. there are a few proverbs that have counterparts in other languages, and sometimes we can obtain them via direct translation, but many times, they are entirely different. proverbs can be categorized into various classes and categories @xcite . they are usually static multi-word expressions having specific keywords. in most cases, we cannot change even a single word in the proverb. if done, then it becomes a simple sentence without an accepted non-compositional meaning. for all languages in the indo-european family in india, sanskrit is considered to be linked to them historically. sanskrit is one of the oldest documented members of the indo european family @xcite . since it is an ancient language, the wisdom embedded in sanskrit proverbs has been carried forward for thousands of years. however, nowadays the use of proverbs has reduced even in the native spoken languages, let alone the use of proverbs in the sanskrit language. to preserve these wisdom-packed proverbs, we require a digital database with the analysis of the proverbs. some compilations are found having internet base. however, the collections of sanskrit proverbs found on the internet are comparatively small and limited only to the famous proverbs. people refer to these compilations when they are in want of a particular proverb, or the proverbs related to a particular theme or concept. for such reference, a mere compilation does not suffice. there should be an online database in a searchable form. as far as indian languages are concerned, there are no databases of proverbs available and our tool removes this desideratum, and this proverb-net may act as a single reference point. ## literature survey to the best of our knowledge, no online multilingual database of proverbs with comprehensive metadata focused on sanskrit and other indian languages exists. we, therefore present a survey of related literaturethe sources from which we compiled proverbs, proverbial analysis, cognition, multi-word expressions, wordnets, online proverb databases and possible applications. there are many offline collections of proverbs. ābhāṇakajagannātha by jagannath @xcite is a compilation of new proverbs in sanskrit. manwaring (1899) has collected, translated and classified a total of 1910 marathi proverbs. bharatiya kahavat sangraha by @xcite is a collection of proverbs in three volumes of proverbs in fifteen indian languages and can be called as the gītā of indian proverbs. @xcite has composed a collection of proverbs from marathi language which may go into oblivion soon and has tried to preserve these proverbs. such collections are essential in preserving the treasure of language. a vast amount of literature exists on proverbial analysis. several books @xcite @xcite @xcite and articles @xcite @xcite provide deep insights into the journey of the meaning of a proverb from literal meaning to its suggestive meaning. @xcite explores definitions, classification, origin, dissemination, collection, and various case studies of proverbs. @xcite presents a semiotical study of proverbs in pragmatical, syntactical, and semantical dimensions. a psychological study suggests that the ability or inability to explain meanings of proverbs indicates the presence or absence of abstract thinking abilities, and a strong understanding of proverbs reveals essential insights into how people conceptualise metaphorical ideas @xcite . according to @xcite , people should be able to understand the non-compositional meanings of proverbs directly without having to first think about and reject their literal meanings. proverbs belong to a class of multi-word expressions. therefore, research conducted for the identification and analysis of multiword expressions can be applied to the analysis of proverbs. @xcite present a survey on analysing multi-word expressions and provides a more in-depth understanding of tasks related to multi-word expressions like discovery, identification and translation. when it comes to creating and populating proverb databases, automatic identification of proverbs from a textual corpus is beneficial. quite a few ways of automatically identifying proverbs exist. @xcite identify proverbs and their variants by creating a finite state automaton with thirteen commonly found syntactic patterns in proverbs and then test on brazilian portuguese journalistic corpus. @xcite describes a wordbased algorithm that splits input text and known proverbs and to find proverb variants in a given text and uses this to perform machine translation. @xcite perform automatic extraction of idioms, proverbs and their variations from text using statistical approaches. a significant amount of research has been done in the creation of lexical databases. princeton @xcite is a massive database of english lexicons. sanskrit wordnet @xcite is more than just a dictionary and gives different relations between synsets which represent unique concepts. indo wordnet @xcite is a wordnet in multiple indian languages. these wordnets are extensive, but their focus is on single words and not multi-word expressions or proverbs. online proverb databases usually attempt at aggregating proverbs of one or two languages. lauhakangas (2013) created a multilingual database of proverbs in european languages. our database is focused towards indian languages, contains more metadata, flexible categorisation, more features and addresses a different set of goals. ## main contribution we introduce proverbnet, an intricate network of multilingual proverbs equipped with a multipurpose search engine that contains extensive metadata and detailed cognitive analysis. we gather inspiration from sanskrit word-net @xcite and indo wordnet @xcite to design the interface. in order to populate this database and ameliorate the data entry process, we have designed an easy to use and elegant data entry interface. we have also designed a search engine to perform queries on this database. the block diagram of the system is shown in figure 1 . we will now explain the system, and describe the details of various fields and their importance in the next section. ## proverbnet database and data entry interface we have designed proverbnet to contain comprehensive metadata about proverbs. we choose and present the data such that it benefits both, an amateur reader and a proficient researcher in paremiology. the data entry interface (figure 2 ) is fast, responsive, and elegant. the interface is written in react, a javascript framework, and uses material-ui components. currently, we have 2320 sanskrit proverbs in the proverbnet database. amongst them, 1000 proverbs frequently occur in typical sanskrit dialogues. rest of the proverbs are from ābhāṇakajagannātha, a book that comprises of 1320 new and rare sanskrit proverbs. we also have 1366 marathi proverbs, and we are adding proverbs of other languages to the database. the data entry interface enhances the data entry experience by providing various features like language selectors for appropriate data fields, phonetic transliteration from english to any of the selected languages, and a virtual keyboard to type in the desired language. when the phonetic transliteration option is selected, and a language for a particular text box is chosen, one can type a word in english and press space to get the phonetic transliteration of the word into that language. if the transliterated word is incorrect, the user can press backspace to get more word recommendations, and they can replace their word accordingly. a virtual keyboard of the selected language appears under each text field when the option is enabled. the interface has different types of input fields depending on the type of data. on clicking the submit button, the data gets validated and then gets entered into the database. now we explain the importance of the fields present in our database and the data entry interface. proverb: the user can enter a proverb in their language of choice. literal meaning: the literal meaning of the proverb, preferably in english. it is what someone would say if they considered it as a typical sentence without any figurative meaning. secondary meanings: most of the times, the literal meaning of a proverb does not disclose the actual meaning it wants to convey. hence, after following the literal meaning of the proverb, we have to advance to its secondary meaning, lakṣaṇā. suggestive meanings: a proverb is not uttered in vacuum or isolation. a proverb is almost always a reactionary utterance to either refer to something that has happened or to refer to something that will probably take place. so knowing the context in which we use the proverb becomes vital in understanding the essence of a proverb. the same proverb can be uttered in multiple situations by different speakers. this subjectivity is not covered in secondary meaning (lakṣaṇā) as secondary meaning limits itself to figurative meaning.hence a third vṛtti is required to reach the essence of a proverb. this third vṛtti is termed vyañjanā, [the suggestive power (meaning)] in sanskrit linguistics. the metaphorical meaning takes into consideration how a proverb yields itself to multiple situations. understanding, the literal and figurative meanings of a proverb, is only a part of comprehending the proverb completely. the comprehension of a proverb as a whole (and not just the meaning) will be complete only when the listener can relate the proverb to different situations. therefore the suggestive meaning expresses the essence of the proverb. literal, figurative, and suggestive meanings (i.e., abhidhā, lakṣaṇā, vyañjanā) of a proverb are present in the proverbnet. proverbs are 'frozen expressions' with universally accepted fixed meanings hence the variations with reference to context will be minimum. cognition of the proverb: most proverbs may allude to some universal truths or common human behaviours. thus like morale of a story, cognition of proverb gives morale of the proverb wherever applicable. keywords and keyword categories: lauhakangas (2001) describes classification of proverbs into different categories. for better clustering of proverbs and search, we enter certain keywords of those proverbs and define categories. we select the important words from the proverb or their synonyms as keywords. further, we classify these keywords into emotions, animal names, body parts, and similar categories. this facilitates the search of proverbs containing specific words. type of proverb: the nature of proverbs are classified into five broad categories, viz. observation, criticism, comment, suggestion, advice. based on the type of the proverb, the user may select zero or more of these types. observations: the user may enter any specific observations regarding the use of the proverb. sometimes proverb and its literal meaning may lead to a positive outcome, but the action is aimed at the elimination of harmful things. for example, mule kuthār | the english translation of the proverb is 'nipping in the bud', which means destroying a thing from its root. while we normally perceive destruction as bad, if the outcome is positive, the action may still be termed as good. since the proverb suggests destruction, the observation for this proverb is 'negative polarity'. another example of negative polarity is vināshkale viparitbuddhi | here the words have a negative tone, and the outcome is also negative. on the other hand, carāti carato bhaga:| is a proverb having neither a negative tone nor a negative outcome. the observation for this proverb is 'positive polarity'. examples: the user may enter examples of the proverb in a contextual paragraph. the understanding of the use of proverb and its nuances grows with repeated exposure to a proverb. therefore, examples would help the reader understand the use of proverb and show a possible usage of the proverb as well. reference: the user may enter the source of a proverb if available. in sanskrit, many proverbs originate from sanskrit subhaṣhitas. many subhaṣhitas have a structure where the first line or first three lines provide an example, and the last line summarises the observation. the last line is commonly used as proverb rather than quoting entire shloka. many of us are not even aware that a particular sūkti is part of a verse. if we understand the whole verse, it becomes easier to understand the essence of that sūkti on the backdrop of the thought/ idea conveyed in the whole verse. e.g. maunm sarvārthsadhanm | keeping mum or remaining silent is beneficial. it is the last caraṇa, i.e. line of the following verse. ## search we have designed a search interface (figure 3 ) to search for proverbs in the desired language. the search takes input a single or a multi-word query in a language specified by the user. the search interface has a transliteration option to type in english, and the text automatically gets transliterated to the selected language. it also has a virtual keyboard to type in the desired language. on submitting, the interface sends the search request to the back-end server for processing. on getting the response, we dis-play the search results in a convenient format inspired by the indo wordnet @xcite . the search interface has buttons to filter output proverbs by language. the proverbs are displayed as cards and have a button to expand them and display their stored metadata. it also has a feature to perform an in-depth search and get more results. users can also specify the type of the query to search specific metadata. user searches can vary from getting a proverb by entering a part of it to find the processes of cognition of proverbs related to a specific theme. one can search for proverbs by typing in the entire proverb ( bhavitavyānām dvārāṇi bhavanti sarvatra |). if they do not know the entire proverb, they can type a few words of the proverb as well (bhavitavyānām bhavanti). if they want to find out a proverb with a given meaning, they can type the meaning of the proverb and get the proverbs that have the entered meaning. the meaning can be literal, secondary or suggestive (no one can change the destiny, or destiny is inevitable). therefore, proverbnet acts as a thesaurus of proverbs as well. one can search for proverbs containing specific keywords (bhavitavya, dvāra) or their categories (fate). to get complete śloka, or get proverbs written in specific reference, or get entire proverbs by a particular author, one can enter the reference name or the author name (śhākuntalam, kālidāsa). users can get proverbs that have similar processes of cognition, classification, and other metadata. the output of a sample query is shown in figure 3 . the search currently uses a two-step algorithm to get the relevant output. we assume that the user will generally enter keywords, classification, or a part of the proverb as the search query. the first step of the algorithm is to match proverb prefixes (includes full proverb) with the search query, match exact keywords or categories, and classification. make individual queries on each table and collate the results. if there are matches, return them. if no matches are present, execute the second step of the search. another way to trigger the second step is to click the button called 'more results' provided in the search interface. the second step is to perform a broader search. we break the search query into individual words and remove certain words (e.g. a, and, the), search each word in all of the fields of the database, and return those proverbs not returned in the previous step. this step yields a more extensive collection of proverbs, and they are lesser relevant to the search query than those returned in the first step. we also have another selector in the interface that to specify the type of search query if needed (e.g. meaning, classification) to get more relevant and narrower search results. selecting the option enables search in only those specific fields. ## applications there are quite a few possible applications of proverbnet. proverbnet can be used as an online resource for authors and readers to understand proverbs, as the literal translation may not lead to a comprehensive understanding. furthermore, the current state-ofthe-art systems fail to translate proverbs correctly, and there is a need for such a multilingual resource for correct automatic translation of proverbs. also, proverbnet will help get closer to solving the problem of word sense disambiguation. proverbnet can also become a learning resource as an educational applica-tion. finally, proverbnet will be useful to get equivalent proverbs in different languages in one place. ## future work we are adding proverbs from other languages to proverbnet. the design of proverbnet ensures little changes to add newer languages. we plan to implement deep learning models to identify proverbs and use proverbnet for automatic translation. we are also working towards clustering the different entries to create newer entries, so the equivalent proverbs in different data entries get clubbed together. for users having difficulty reading the words in the language present in the database, we plan to add automatic transliteration and translation of metadata in different languages.