The J apanese W ordnet 2.0 (2023)

Abstract: This paper describes a new release of the Japanese wordnet. It uses the new global wordnet formats (McCrae et al., 2021) to incorporate a range of new information: orthographic variants (including hiragana, katakana and Latin representations) first described in Kuroda et al. (2011), classifiers, pronouns and exclamatives (Morgado da Costa and Bond, 2016) and many new senses, motivated both from corpus annotation and linking to the TUFs basic vocabulary (Bond et al., 2020). The wordnet has been moved to github and is available at https://bond-lab.github.io/wnja/.

## introduction this paper describes a new release of the japanese wordnet, v2.0. this new version of the japanese wordnet includes orthographic variants and transliterations @xcite , classifiers, exclamatives @xcite and pronouns @xcite , as well as words introduced during the annotation of the ntu multilingual corpus @xcite . this is the first release in almost 10 years, and has a numerous changes. the japanese wordnet was started at the national institute of information and communications technology (nict) based on the expand approach of adding japanese lemmas to existing princeton wordnet 3.0 @xcite synsets, with plans to follow this up by annotating a corpus and adding missing words (extend). this allowed us to take advantage initially of the rich information in the princeton wordnet. the progress of construction is shown in the second release (v0.91: 2009-08) was a bugfix release, with slightly more synsets (50,739) but fewer senses, as we checked more of the automatically built synsets. this release included links to images in the open clip art library (ocal @xcite and the suggested upper merged ontology ( @xcite . finally, there was one more bug-fix release @xcite this time with fewer synsets as well as senses. the next major release (v1.0: 2010-03) saw the addition of definitions and example sentences @xcite . these were automatically translated from english, using a specialized corpus of example sentences, and then hand corrected. as this was part of research to produce a large parallel corpus at nict, all definitions and examples were translated, even if they did not have any japanese lemmas associated with them. we next decided to do some work on producing sense-tagged corpora in order to see how well the wordnet did on describing real world japanese text. for our first attempt, we created the japanese sem-cor (jsemcor) a (partially) sense-tagged corpus of japanese @xcite . the final corpus consists of 14,169 sentences with 150,555 content words of which 58,265 are sense tagged. it allowed us to provide sense frequency data for the japanese wordnet. we next annotated over 7,000 sentences in the ntu multilingual corpus @xcite , including news text, tourism text, short stories and an essay. this has led us to identify many missing concepts as well as many missing senses. there are 20,386 sense tagged words (including multi-word expressions) annotated in the japanese portion of the corpus, with 6,706 distinct senses. in 2014 a python module was developed that allowed the wnja 1.1 data to be used in nltk @xcite . goodman and bond (2021) made a module for the new wordnet structure, which can this release has more concepts, slightly fewer senses and words (as we delete bad entries) and many more variant forms (described in the next section). ## richer information this release of the wordnet gathers together several improvements. ## new entries we have expanded the vocabulary of the japanese wordnet through a combination of corpus annotation and systematic expansion of lexical fields. we try to add not just individual words, but also complete semantic fields together, especially when there is a difference in conceptual structure with english. here are some of the major additions in this release 1. numeral classifiers (not used in english) 2. pronouns (not in the princeton wordnet) 3. exclamatives (not in the princeton wordnet) 4. time/date expressions (often split into different units than in english) 5. japanese kinship terms (richer than english) the semi-closed classes of pronouns, classifiers and exclamatives were added to the chinese, english, indonesian and malay wordnets at the same time, as described in seah and @xcite and @xcite . the numbers of new entries for the different classes are given in ## more accessible earlier versions of the japanese wordnet were available at a university web site, with the data stored in sourceforge. for this release, data and documentation are stored in github, to make them more permenant. the wordnet is available online, both as plain xml, and as a released tarball with the license and canonical citation. this can be loaded directly from the python wn module (goodman and bond, 2021), or the omw interface. the japanese wordnet can be found here: https://bond-lab. github.io/wnja/ . ## conclusions this paper presents the current state of the japanese wordnet: wnja. we hope that wnja will continue to be a useful resource not only for natural language processing, but also for language education/learning and linguistic research. in future work, we want to look more at the description of formality and politeness, as well as to increase the coverage.