Where Bears Have the Eyes of Currant: Towards a M ansi W ord N et (2016)

Abstract: Here we report the construction of a wordnet for Mansi, an endangered minority language spoken in Russia. We will pay special attention to challenges that we encountered during the building process, among which the most important ones are the low number of native speakers, the lack of thesauri and the bear language. We will discuss our solutions to these issues, which might have some theoretical implications for the methodology of wordnet building in general.

## introduction wordnets are lexical databases that are rendered according to semantic and lexical relations between groups of words. they are supposed to reflect the internal organization of the human mind @xcite . the first wordnet was constructed for english @xcite and since that time, wordnets have been built for several languages including several european languages, mostly in the framework of eurowordnet and balkanet @xcite and other languages such as arabic, chinese, persian, hindi, tulu, dravidian, tamil, telugu, sanskrit, assamese, filipino, gujarati, nepali, kurdish, sinhala @xcite @xcite . synsets within wordnets for different languages are usually linked to each other, so concepts from one language can be easily mapped to those in another language. wordnets can be beneficial for several natural language processing tasks, be it mono-or multilingual: for instance, in machine translation, information retrieval and so on. in this paper, we aim at constructing a wordnet for mansi, an indigenous language spoken in russia. mansi is an endangered minority language, with less than 1000 native speakers. most often, minority languages are not recognized as official languages in their respective countries, where there is an official language (in this case, russian) and there is one or there are several minority languages (e.g. mansi, nenets, saami etc.). hence, the speakers of minority languages are bilingual, and usually use the official or majority language in their studies and work, and the language of administration is the majority language as well. however, the minority language is typically restricted to the private sphere, i.e. among family members and friends, and thus it is mostly used in oral communication, with only sporadic examples of writing in the minority language @xcite . also, the cultural and ethnographic background of mansi people may affect language use: certain artifacts used by mansi people that are unknown to western cultures have their own vocabulary items in mansi and vice versa, certain concepts used by western people are unknown to mansi people, therefore there are no lexicalized terms for them. the construction of a mansi wordnet help us explore how a wordnet can be built for a minority language and also, an endangered language. thus, we will investigate the following issues in this paper: the paper has the following structure. first, the mansi language will be shortly presented from linguistic, sociolinguistic and language policy perspectives. then our methods to build the mansi wordnet will be discussed, with special emphasis on specific challenges as regards endangered and minority languages in general and mansi in particular. later, statistical data will be analysed and our results will be discussed in detail. finally, a summary will conclude the paper. ## the mansi language mansi (former term: vogul) is an extremely endangered indigenous uralic (more precisely finno-ugric, ugric, ob-ugric) languages, spoken in western siberia, especially on the territory of the khanty-mansi autonomous okrug. among the approximately 13,000 people who declared to be ethnic mansi according to the data of the latest russian federal census in 2010 only 938 stated that they could speak the mansi language. the mansi have been traditionally living on hunting, fishing, to a lesser extent also on reindeer breeding, they got acquainted with agriculture and urban lifestyle basically during the soviet period. the principles of soviet linguistic policy according to which the mansi literary language has been designed kept changing from time to time. after using latin transcription for a short period, mansi language planners had to switch to the cyrillic transcription in 1937. while until the 1950s the more general tendency was to create new mansi words to describe the formerly unknown phenomena, later on the usage of russian loanwords became more dominant. as a result of these tendencies some of the terms describing contemporary environment, urban lifestyle, the russian-dominated culture are russian loanwords, while others are mansi neologisms created by mansi linguists and journalists. it is not uncommon to find two or even three different synonyms describing the same phenomena (for example, hospital): by the means of borrowing the word from russian (áîëüe íèöà), or using the russian loanword in a form adapted to the mansi phonology (ï© yëüíèöà), or using a mansi neologism to describe it (ì© õóì ïóe ñìàëòàí êîë, 'a house for healing people, hospital', as opposed to í© ÿâðàì ïóñìàëòàí êîë 'children hospital, children's clinic' or © yéõóë ïóñìàëe òàí êîë 'veterinary clinic'). ## semi-automatic construction of the mansi wordnet in this section, we will present our methods to construct the mansi wordnet. we will also pay special attention to the most challenging issues concerning wordnet building. ## discussion building a wordnet for a minority or endangered language can have several challenges. some of these are also relevant for dead languages, however, wordnets for e.g. latin @xcite , ancient greek @xcite and sanskrit @xcite prove that these facts do not necessarily mean an obstacle for wordnet construction. here we summarize the most important challenges and how we solved them while constructing the mansi wordnet. ## conclusions in this paper, we reported the construction of a wordnet for mansi, an endangered minority language spoken in russia. as we intend to make the mansi wordnet freely available for everyone, we hope that this newly created language resource will contribute to the revitalization of the mansi language. in the future, we would like to extend the mansi wordnet with new synsets. moreover, we intend to create applications that make use of this language resource, for instance, online dictionaries and linguistic games for learners of mansi.