S arda N et: a Linguistic Resource for S ardinian Language (2018)

Abstract: This paper describes the process of building SardaNet, a linguistic resource for Sardinian language including the different linguistic varieties in Sardinia. SardaNet aims at identifying the semantic relations between Sardinian terms, by manually mapping existing WordNet entries to Sardinian word senses. The work, still in progress, has been developed in collaboration with the University of Cagliari. After discussing some linguistic peculiarities, the paper presents the basic steps of the construction process, the method and the tools involved, the issues encountered during the development and the current version of SardaNet.

## introduction sardinian territory is characterized by a strong multilingualism, in which it is difficult to trace the precise boundaries between a variant and the other, each characterized by its phonetic, morphological and lexical features. for a long time, the linguists have been trying to put the distinction between the different linguistic variants spoken in sardinia, but there is not an unanimously shared theory. sardanet examines the sardinian linguistic variants to which the "legge regionale 26 del 1997" (regional law 26 of 1997 for the preservation of linguistic minority) refers: campidanese, nuorese and logudorese, and also the other not-sardinian variants spoken in the island such as sassarese, gallurese, tabarchino and algherese. the ultimate goal is the development of the semantic network related to wordnet foot_0 @xcite and enriched with the peculiar terms and the concepts defined in the sardinian languages. sardanet, in its first preliminary version, has been manually developed, starting with the set of 4689 common base concepts 2 (cbcs) extended by @xcite in the princeton wordnet 2.0 version, by inserting the corresponding terms in the sardinian variants. the work has been developed in collaboration with the university of cagliari. two trainees, coordinated by the prof. maurizio virdis, leading expert on sardinian studies, worked with us in this first phase of the project. the remainder of this paper is organized as follows: section 1 introduces the resource and the motivation behind, section 2 presents an overview of the sardinian language and its peculiarities and the dictionaries used to build sardanet. section 3 describes the method applied by the team involved, highlighting some emerging issues, while section 4 depicts the building of the resource, the interface used, the lmf format and the mapping cili. finally, in section 5 final remarks and future works directions are presented. ## the sardinian language before starting the development of sardanet, several discussions with sardinian language experts of the university of cagliari were conducted to better understand the key features of the language. as it is reported in @xcite , sardinian is a neo-latin language, which derives by the evolution of the latin language, like italian, french, spanish, portuguese and romanian. compared to other neo-latin languages, sardinian evidences some peculiarities and even considerable diversities. the written production in sardinian language was in fact very plentiful, used in official and documentary written, or in patrimonial and juridical documents, and in particular the condaghes. the condaghe, from the medieval sardinian term kondake (from the greek κοντακιον), was a kind of administrative document used in the sardinian giudicati between the 11th and 13th centuries. the condaghe of santa maria di bonàrcado, more in details, allows having a valid source for the philological and glottological studies of the sardinian language, and in particular, for the arborensis area @xcite . as for the lexicon, sardinian lexical heritage is an original amalgam of latin, of ancient and modern italian, of catalan and spanish, often with unique and distinctive creations and interpretations. the sardinian has long lived in a state of increasing marginalization by official uses and has been only restricted to familiar and colloquial use. it has been used mainly in low linguistic registers, or most of all for poetic literary compositions, and sometimes it has been also considered a language of marginal use compared to spanish and italian. currently, the most difficult phase for sardinian and for dialects in general seems to be overcoming. people are less afraid to speak in dialect, sometimes rediscovering a pride in speaking the native national language. at italian level, but even more within the european community, the cultural, historical and anthropological value of european minority languages, such as sardinian, is becoming more and more important. political and cultural actions have been launched to save them, and even the regional politic in sardinia tends to bring sardinian language back to schools and proposes projects to perform that. sardinian is a particular language: there are a lot a variants in relation of the region considered such as logudorese, nuorese, campidanese, and not native such as sassarese, catalano, gallurese and tabarchino, as depicted in figure 1 that displays the geographical distribution of the varieties of sardinian. as explained in @xcite , sardinian language is spoken in sardinia and only in sardinia (excluding the large number of emigrants who carry, speak and practice sardinian language outside of the island). but sardinian language is not spoken in all sardinia: in fact, it is necessary to exclude gallura, where a southern course dialect is spoken, alghero where catalan is spoken, and finally carloforte and calasetta where ligurian is spoken. the sassarese has particular historical origins, born in the middle age at the time of pisan-genovese penetration as a free language due to a contact effect between two linguistic types: the sardinian and the italian continental one. logudorese and nuorese are mainly spoken in the northern sub-region of the island. campidanese is the variety of the sardinian language primarily spoken in south central sardinia. the language has never had a real unification and never linguistic variety above the others has been imposed. sometimes who speaks a variant of north sardinia has some difficulties in understanding a variant of south sardinia and vice versa. so it is sometimes difficult to communicate. due to these peculiarities of sardinian language, we decided, according to prof. maurizio virdis, to insert in the sardinian wordnet, for each wordnet entry, the indication of the language variation, considering them as synonyms, and following the expand approach. ## methodology the work, still in progress, was performed manually taking advantage of the involvement and the linguistic expertise of some trainees belonging to the university of cagliari, coordinated by the prof. maurizio virdis. the construction of the resource is based on the list of the 4689 common base concepts expanded by balkanet from the initial set of 1024 common base concepts developed in the european project eurowordnet @xcite sardanet is created by using the expand approach, starting from the multilingual index and translating the english various synsets into the sardinian language. this approach is more attractive since it maintains the multilingual index as the main structure and central repository of concepts and also allows to automatically using semantic relations already present in the english wordnet. according to @xcite , the majority of wordnets are based on the expand approach, exactly 28 out of 33 of the wordnets included in the openmultilingual wordnet (omw) foot_4 . ## building sardanet in order to build sardanet, it was necessary to set up an interface able to display for each term in english its synonyms, the corresponding synset ids, the pos, the definition, and allowing the terms to be included in each of the variants of the sardinian language. ## conclusions and future works in its first release, sardanet includes only a partial set of the 4689 common base concepts expanded by balkanet from the initial set of 1024 common base concepts developed in the european project eurowordnet. so we are first planning to complete all the senses available in the set of cbcs. although there are many terms, common saying and phrases typical of sardinian language, they are not currently present in sardanet. we leave out the glosses in the sardinian language and the frequency of use of the sardinian terms for each synset, even if they are required in the lmf format. further works will include both the glosses and the frequency of the terms, that will be calculated both manually, using the available dictionaries, and automatically by means of a corpus of sardinian documents. we are also taking into account to enrich sardanet with new terms, currently not included in the english wordnet, but characteristic of the sardinian language.