Multisłownik: Linking pl W ord N et-based Lexical Data for Lexicography and Educational Purposes (2018)

Abstract: Multisłownik is an automated integrator of Polish lexical data retrieved from multiple available online sources intended to be used in various scenarios requiring access to such data, most prominently dictionary creation, linguistic studies and education. In contrast to many available internet dictionaries Multisłownik is WordNet-centric, capturing the core definitions from Słowosiec ́, the Polish WordNet, and linking external resources to particular synsets. The paper provides details of construction of the resource, discussed the difficulties related to linking different logical structures of underlying data and investigates two sample scenarios for using the resulting platform.

## introduction multisłownik (pol. multidictionary) is a linguistic integration platform for polish lexical data retrieved from multiple available online sources intended to be used in various research and educational scenarios. the difficulty of such setting is clear: lexical data is created for different purposes resulting in various underlying structures and representation formats, tailored to specific requirements of each subfield of linguistics. for instance, morphological dictionaries may not differentiate word senses when inflectional patterns of each sense is the same; in turn, when they are different, senses can be assigned properly but at the same time usage examples from corpora restricted to a given sense may be difficult to retrieve. the paper presents an attempt of creating such linked resource for polish using computational methods. section 2 presents similar attempts for other languages, section 3 describes the data sources used, section 4 documents the decisions made during the process of data linking, section 5 provides two sample scenarios based on the integrated data and section 6 summarizes the paper and presents the work in progress. ## related work in contemporary lexicography there can be seen a tendency to integrate dictionaries into portals foot_0 mainly provided as a source of information for the ordinary users rather than linguists and researchers. usually the idea of such portals is to give maximum data big publicity as possible with a minimal effort. as compared to fran, a slovenian dictionary of a similar type 2 , gathering in-house lexical resources available to the fran ramovš institute of the slovenian language zrc sazu, the initial assumption was that external resources will be used as well. the reason for such a decision was a desire to present polish vocabulary in an extensive way which seemed to be impossible while using only open resources or those published by a single unit. unlike in slovenia, the main polish linguistic sources were prepared by various publishing houses and research centres. however, because of the authors' rights, not all the dictionaries could be used in the same way. therefore some of the dictionary data is only presented as references and information whether the searched word can be found in a given dictionary. by default fran presents results 'dictionary by dictionary' ordering them from the general one (with definitions) through etymological and historical to more specialised ones (e.g. spelling dictionary, medical lexicon or the dictionary of climber's language). online dictionary of the pwn publishing house foot_2 offers a similar approach to polish: entries from dictionaries of several types are presented "as is" on a single web page together with language use comments, encyclopaedia entries and corpus-based examples. even less used-friendly dictionary portal of such type foot_3 mainly facilitates searches in various dictionaries providing references to source entries. multisłownik combines the concepts of a dictionary portal and a general dictionary trying emulate a traditional dictionary. therefore the query results are presented in a form of an automatically generated dictionary-like entry. ## sources of lexical data multisłownik integrates three different kinds of lexical resources: we briefly characterize these sources below showing their lexical potential and pointing out their most important features hindering integration. ## integration integration of multiple dictionary resources, heterogenous by nature, poses various problems due to diverse representation and scope of lexical properties, different levels of detail and incompleteness of coverage of lexical entries. for online resources this situation gets additionally hindered by their constant change: new entries are added to lexicons, models are getting restructured and new data sources appear regularly. based on all these assumptions we believe that the close integration of resources in such setting (such as combining them into a common lmf 16 resource) is a myth -the complexity of such resource would need to exceed the complexity of its parts, already very high for most of the resources. our approach is differ-ent and assumes interfacing related sources rather than absorbing them into a single common 'superresource'. at the same time a common point of reference is needed to serve as the core of the integration; for multisłownik we decided it to be słowosieć, the polish wordnet @xcite , further referred to as plwordnet, the most extensive freely available semantic resource offering lexeme-tosense mapping. plwordnet contains extensive description of lexical-semantic relations for polish with interlinked synsets and short definitions, currently featuring over 300k lexical relations, 320k synsets and 1.2m inter-synset relations. in multisłownik it serves as the main source of lexemes and semantic information. since plwordnet and sgjp make the most prominent resources covering respectively semantic and grammatical layers, comparison of these resources was of vital importance. as for the data set, sgjp contains 150k entries which do not have their counterparts in plwordnet (not taking into account negated adjectives, representing in sgjp as separate entries). on the other hand, plwordnet contains 20k entries absent from sgjp. plwordnet contains many multiword lexical units (over 30% of the total number) while sgjp does not cover any multiword entries apart from hyphenated entries such as vis-a-vis or pingpong and a small sample of words functioning today only as parts of fixed phraseological expressions. homonymy is the main problem of linking plwordnet data to sgjp; the set of homonyms contains 3450 nouns, 926 adjectives and 586 verbs. the integration process starts with plwordnet taking over its semantic domains, lexical relation and synset relation types. sgjp is the main source of grammatical data and other resources are used to populate the entry. figure 1 presents a simple web application interfacing multisłownik platform. sections provide information about pronounciation and etymology of the entry, its plwordnet senses with sgjp inflection variants assigned properly, related words retrieved from wikidictionary, concordance from nkjp and information on presence of the lexeme in available online sources. information on pronounciation is presented in two formats: ipa and as. for each sense its domain, definition, example and selected semantic relations as well as english translation are presented. grammatical information covers grammatical class, selective categories and inflection pattern symbol. inflection section presents selected inflectional forms: syntax information is presented according to walenty model and annotation. frequency data and nkjp-based quotations are currently dynamically retrieved using pelcra search engine. ## possible usage scenarios the aggregation platform is intended to reflect a standard dictionary, therefore the results are presented in a form similar to a dictionary entry and reflect its microstructure. each entry provides a number of slots for information: headword, pronunciation, etymology, senses/definitions, grammar information (inflectional patterns), translations into english, derived words and collocates, concordances with quantitative data from the nkjp. an important part are links to online dictionaries of surnames, geographical names, antonyms, synonyms, city slang vocabulary and new vocabulary which makes getting information about the contents of other sources, popularity or importance of lemmata very straightforward. ## conclusions and further steps multisłownik already proved useful in many scenarios related to combining lexical information by offering a simple yet practical method of referring to multiple sources at the same time. the most obvious further direction for extension of multisłownik is adding more data; it occurs that even resources less relevant to the current task, e.g. numerous historical corpora can help lexicographers retrieve usage examples from historical texts to trace back the change of word meanings. another type of interesting functionality of multisłownik would be searching for so called "cultural traces" of a given word. apart from offering the user extensive dictionary-based grammatical and semantic information also references of a given word or phrase to important artwork (e.g. its presence novel and movie titles, lyrics of popular song or famous quotes) could be tracked. this would require building much larger datasets based on library catalogues, movie databases and wikiqoute, integrated and sorted according to its impact on both high and popular culture.