On a Hurtlex Resource for B ulgarian (2024)

Abstract: The paper reports on the cleaning of the Hurtlex lexicon for Bulgarian as part of the multilingual Hurtlex resource. All the challenges during the cleaning process are presented, such as: deleting strings or lexica that are clear errors from the automatic translation, establishing criteria for keeping or discarding a lexeme based on its meaning and potential usages, contextualizing the lexeme with the meaning through an example, etc. In addition, the paper discusses the mapping of the offensive lexica to the BTB-Wordnet as well as the system that has been used.

## introduction the hurtlex resource is a multilingual lexicon of hate/offensive words. this resource started with the italian hate lexicon developed by tullio de mauro and organized in 17 categories. later on, it was automatically extended to other languages -through links to available synset-based lexical thesauri, among them multiwordnet @xcite and babelnet @xcite . also machine translation was used @xcite . hurtlex is a lexicon of offensive, aggressive, and hate words in over 50 languages among which bulgarian. the words were classified in 17 categories like the source area of usage (plants, animals) or the target qualities or groups (moral and behavioral defects, with potential negative connotations). also, a category was added whether the word expresses a stereotype or not. since stereotypes are culture specific and usually determined through specially designed questionnaires within sociolinguistic frameworks, for bulgarian this information has not been gathered yet. thus, for the moment the inherited stereotypes from the hurtlex resource are available without a focused localalized justification.. the hate words belong also to two other categories: either conservative (where only words with offensive senses were translated from the original lexicon) or inclusive (where all the potentially relevant senses of the words in the original lexicon were translated). as a result from the automatic translation due to the non-exhaustive coverage of various linked multilingual wordnets and lexical resources, the translated counterparts might include ambiguous, incorrect or questionable words. thus, during the process of obtaining the hurtlex lexicons in other languages, it became clear that there is noise in the resulting resources such as inappropriate, non-comprehensible or unclear in their offensive meanings words. as a result, some cleaning is needed over the obtained lexicon per language. such a cleaning, for example, was already performed for modern greek by @xcite . the authors detect greek offensive language by cross-classifying words on three dimensions: context, reference, and thematic domain. they add to the categorization also the social and the cultural aspect which are language specific. here we present a work in progress on the cleaning and linking of the bulgarian part of hurtlex. version 1.2 for bulgarian was downloaded from the hurtlex repository foot_0 and then manually checked. initially, it had altogether 2865 words but some were already initially deleted since there were repetitions of the wordforms of the same lexeme. also, normalization was performed over the same words with varying spelling -mostly the same word with a capital and small letter. at the moment the lexicon consists of 1370 words which means that slightly more than 50 % of the original list of words were discarded before the human checks. at the same time, the lexicon is further enriched with the synonyms in the appropriate synsets through the sense mappings with btb-wordnet @xcite . in addition, it has to be noted that hurtlex does not include only isolated words but also phrases. despite this fact, the proper handling of multiword expressions remains for future work since some of them came as isolated words and other -as expressions. the structure of the paper is as follows: the next section presents the system that has been used for cleaning and enriching the resource. section 3 discusses in more detail the workflow and challenges when editing the data. section 4 focuses on the mapping of the hurtlex lexicon to the btb-wordnet. section 5 outlines the conclusions. ## the resource editing system the hurtlex list for bulgarian was inserted into a customized version of the specially designed clada-bg dictionary creation system @xcite . the system presents a multifunctional editor that can be used for creating various types of lexical resources -thesauri like wordnets, or traditional types of dictionaries (specialized, explanatory, spelling, etc.). the system also provides possibilities of interlinking the available data depending on the goal. in general, the following information is present in the customized version: an example of a word is the last one down left in the table мърморко, 'marmorko-m.sg' (a grumbler). an example for a phrase is социален аутсайдер, 'sotsialen-m.sg autsayder-m.sg' (a social outsider). both get a noun as part of speech. the status marking shows whether the checking is accomplished (label ready) or it should be paid attention to later (label to check). it also indicates whether the word is considered non-appropriate for the lexicon (label irrelevant). we are aware of the fact that such decisions are not easy to take since many words can become offensive in a given context. for that reason they are not removed but just marked as not appropriate. thus, we start with the lexemes or phrases with offensive lexical meaning and gradually will consider also the context-bound cases. if the word is already present in the wordnet with the offensive meaning, then its id, category, definition, examples, etc. are copied into hurtlex. if however, the lemma/meaning is not present there, a definition is added by the editing linguist together with an example. the new information will be added to the btb-wordnet as well. the linguist can leave comments of the following types: either there is no definition in the available dictionaries and other sources, or the definition is newly constructed, or the meaning is not offensive. despite the labels of readiness, additional systematic checks will be necessary after this first proceedings of clib 2024 phase of hurtlex data cleaning. also, a strategy is required on how to deal with words are not offensive through their lexical meaning but might become offensive in a certain expression or communicative situation. for example, the word птица, 'ptitsa-f.sg' is not offensive but in the expression странна птица, 'stranna-f.sg ptitsa-f.sg' (a strange person) it might become offensive. another observation is that many words are not offensive but they just refer to intolerable models in society or bear mostly neutral meanings. for example, such type of words are фалш, 'falsh' (falseness) or мълва, 'malva-f.sg' (a rumor). an additional obstacle is the fact that we had to work with words without senses and contextualizing examples. let us look more closely into the challenges of cleaning hurtlex in the next section. ## cleaning hurtlex: workflow and challenges the workflow includes several steps and these are organized in the following way: thus, for the word тиква, 'tikva' (pumpkin) which is an offensive-oriented name of the head as part of the human body, there is an accompanying offensive synset in the wordnet, and the information is copied here. this entry can be seen in figure 2 . it provides the category noun.body, the set of synonyms as well as the definition. it should be noted that at this stage the synonyms in btb-wordnet are not marked as colloquial, dialectal, jargon and the like. these markings are envisaged for the future. then comes the spelling of the word, its part of speech -noun, the status of the entry -in this case ready, and the inclusion in wordnet -in this case true. the method of having obtained this word in bulgarian is marked as inclusive, i.e. all the potentially relevant senses were translated. the hurtlex category is abbreviated as or -this means a relation to plants. the lexeme is not considered stereotypical but as it was mentioned above, we should take this inherited information with a grain of salt since this dimension of information requires a special survey. ## mappings to btb-wordnet since no mapping to synsets in bulgarian wordnets was available in the originally compiled hurtlex, we established our own mapping. in some cases, hurtlex is being enriched with the synonyms of the lexeme -either also offensive ones, or from other registers. in other cases, the lexeme is not present in the wordnet and thus has to be mapped through some strategy such as a link to an appropriate hyponym and/or a hypernym. the most common cases of not having links to wordnet are the following: the ready entry means that there is no problem of identifying the word or phrase as an offensive one. more entries are like this but also a substantial part requires further elaboration. for example, the lexeme козел, 'kozel-m.sg' (a billy-goat) is marked as ready but the link to the wordnet is to the meaning of man with a long sharp beard only. in fact, the examples show wider offensive usage towards an old man with an inappropriate behaviour. no definition refers to cases where a definition in this meaning cannot be found on a regular basis in bulgarian dictionaries. but such cases are very rare. most cases here refer to words that do not have an offensive meaning (like празненство, 'praznenstvo-n.sg', (celebration)) and to words that show ironic meaning in the relevant context. ## conclusions this paper presents work in progress on the cleaning and enriching the bulgarian hurtlex resource. the main steps in this ongoing work and the related challenges have been outlined. another challenge that was not mentioned before is the difficulty to handle the contemporary cases with rapid change of some words from positive to negative or with the emergence of an offensive meaning in a specific context like the political arena. the next steps include: a) the handling of context-dependent offensive lexica; b) the handling of multiword expressions and bigger contexts; c) the addition of the missing lemmas and meanings into btb-wordnet. as future work we also consider the annotation of a corpus with offensive senses. only in this way more precise criteria can be set with respect to the delimitation of the offensive meanings within their context-bound process of generation.