Towards a Crowd-Sourced W ord N et for Colloquial E nglish (2018)

Abstract: Princeton WordNet is one of the most widely-used resources for natural language processing, but is updated only infrequently and cannot keep up with the fast-changing usage of the English language on social media platforms such as Twitter. The Colloquial WordNet aims to provide an open platform whereby anyone can contribute, while still following the structure of WordNet. Many crowd-sourced lexical resources often have significant quality issues, and as such care must be taken in the design of the interface to ensure quality. In this paper, we present the development of a platform that can be opened on the Web to any lexicographer who wishes to contribute to this resource and the lexicographic methodology applied by this interface.

## introduction the colloquial wordnet foot_0 , first introduced in @xcite , is an extension to princeton wordnet @xcite that focuses on the use of neologisms and vulgar terminology foot_1 . the first version of this resource was created primarily by one lexicographer and as such scaling this resource to be able to cover more of the neologisms in english is a significant issue. in this paper, we detail the improvements we have made to the tools that lie behind this resource to enable a more open process for the creation of the resource. we started by detailing the guidelines and methodology for creating the resource and writing new documentation to support lexicographers in their work in annotating the data. we also added the possibility to add a confidence so that non-expert lexicographers would be able to provide annotations with some uncertainty. we then improved the interface in order to make it more intuitive for users with little knowledge of the project to use. in particular, we removed a lot of the 'implicit assumptions' of the interface that said that if certain options were chosen then other options could not be chosen. furthermore, we integrated the guidelines in the editor so that lexicographers could easily look up the guidelines at any point where there is uncertainty. finally, we introduced the idea of queues, where an annotator could add a number of terms, which have been automatically identified as potentially interesting, and these items can be held in the queue for a period of time, before being freed up. this methodology allows multiple lexicographers to collaborate without duplication of effort as each lexicographer's queue can be kept separate. the candidates that are in the queue are derived from twitter and we detail the approach that we have taken to preprocessing the corpus and extracting the candidate terms from the result. finally, we consider the issue of attracting new lexicographers for the resource and detail our plans to use student annotators and the creation of subtasks that may be of particular interest to individual lexicographers. these suggest a wider application of the methodology to more than just creating dictionaries for english neologisms. this project report represents the summary of recent work to create a resource that is more open and will be created by more than one lexicographer. ## colloquial wordnet annotation methodology the methodology for creating colloquial word-net entries is based on annotating interesting words or short phrases from a corpus of tweets. the lexicographer will be presented with a lemma and a number of example tweets and is expected to use these in order to write the entry. this is done in three steps: firstly, the lexicographer should check the lemma and examples and make sure he or she is familiar with the term or perform appropriate research in order to find the definition of the term. then the lexicographer should sort the entry into its status (see section 2.2), which will influence the method by-which it is further annotated. then, the main body of the entry is created, in most cases in terms of the senses that define the meaning and any links to other senses. ## supporting lexicographers to facilitate the development of colloquial word-net future work involves using linguistics students as annotators and creating subtasks focused on a particular domain of interest so that lexicographers who are proficient with the use of terms that are specific to particular subdomains and communities. ## conclusion in this paper we present the progress in the development of colloquial wordnet editor and its tools. while there exist many other tools for editing wordnets, e.g., @xcite @xcite or wordnetloom @xcite , none of these tools meet our goal of being an open web-based development platform that can be used by any user. the goal of colloquial wordnet is to be more open, and as such we do not necessarily expect the same level of expertise from our lexicographers or quality in the resulting resource. instead, we understand colloquial wordnet to provide a good wordnet-level coverage of english as it used in social media, which will be helpful to handling noisy user-generated text, a problem that has caused significant issues for natural language processing recently @xcite . currently the resource consists of the same 428 entries previously detailed @xcite , however we now expect to work on expanding the resource. furthermore, we believe that the exercise of developing the colloquial wordnet can identify key words that we hope will contribute to the next version of princeton wordnet and should assist the lexicographers by providing entries that can be further extended into pwn entries.