Sophisticated Lexical Databases - Simplified Usage: Mobile Applications and Browser Plugins For Wordnets (2016)

Abstract: India is a country with 22 officially recognized languages and 17 of these have WordNets, a crucial resource. Web browser based interfaces are available for these WordNets, but are not suited for mobile devices which deters people from effectively using this resource. We present our initial work on developing mobile applications and browser extensions to access WordNets for Indian Languages. Our contribution is two fold: (1) We develop mobile applications for the Android, iOS and Windows Phone OS platforms for Hindi, Marathi and Sanskrit WordNets which allow users to search for words and obtain more information along with their translations in English and other Indian languages. (2) We also develop browser extensions for English, Hindi, Marathi, and Sanskrit WordNets, for both Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome. We believe that such applications can be quite helpful in a classroom scenario, where students would be able to access the WordNets as dictionaries as well as lexical knowledge bases. This can help in overcoming the language barrier along with furthering language understanding.

## introduction india is among the topmost countries in the world with massive language diversity. according to a recent census in 2001, there are 1,365 rationalized mother tongues, 234 identifiable mother-tongues and 122 major languages foot_0 . of these, 29 languages have more than a million native speakers, 60 have more than 100,000 and 122 have more than 10,000 native speakers. with this in mind, the construction of the indian wordnets, the indowordnet @xcite project was initiated which was an effort undertaken by over 12 educational and research institutes headed by iit bombay. indian word-nets were inspired by the pioneering work of princeton wordnet @xcite and currently, there exist wordnets for 17 indian languages with the smallest one having around 14,900 synsets and the largest one being hindi with 39,034 synsets and 100,705 unique words. each wordnet is accessible by web interfaces amongst which hindi wordnet @xcite , marathi wordnet and sanskrit word-net @xcite were developed at iit bombay foot_1 . the wordnets are updated daily which are reflected on the websites the next day. we have developed mobile applications for the hindi, marathi and sanskrit wordnets, which are the first of their kind to the best of our knowledge. this paper is organized as follows: section 2 gives the motivations for the work. section 3 contains the descriptions of the application with screen-shots and the nitty gritties. we describe the browser extensions in section 4, and we conclude the paper with conclusions, and future work in section 5. at the very end, some screen-shots of the applications and browser extensions are provided. ## motivation according to recent statistics, about 117 million indians foot_2 , are connected to the internet through mobile devices. it is common knowledge that websites like facebook, twitter, linkedin, gmail and so on can be accessed using their web browser based interfaces but the mobile applications developed for them are much more popular. this is a clear indicator that browser based interfaces are inconvenient which was the main motivation behind our work. we studied the existing interfaces and the wordnet databases and developed applications for android, ios and windows phone platforms, which we have extensively tested and plan to release them to the public as soon as possible. our applications and plugins are applicable in the following use cases: apart from the cases mentioned above, there are many other cases where our apps and plugins can be used effectively. ## mobile wordnet applications in the subsections below we describe the features of the applications accompanied by screen-shots. ## browser extensions major wordnets of the world are available via web interfaces, enabling a user to search for the senses using a web browser on a computer or mobile. the process commonly involves a user navigating to a web page, and searching the required 'word' for its senses. in a world where getting things done in one click is important, we feel that the process of searching needs to be simplified. we develop browser extensions to ease this process. google chrome and mozilla firefox are the most popular web browsers among the web users foot_6 . our approach makes the search quite simple and is summarized in the following 3 steps: we present the sample context menu screenshots, post installation in figures 6 and 7 , respectively. ## conclusions and future work in this era of handheld mobile devices, there is a great need to make available traditional web services as mobile applications which are extremely popular. our success in developing mobile applications for hindi, marathi and sanskrit wordnets along with browser plugins for english, hindi, marathi and sanskrit to simplify word look-up is the first step in providing people with easy access to such important knowledge bases. we have described a variety of use cases for our apps and plugins which are quite realistic, especially in india where language and cultural diversity is quite varied. these can have a huge impact on language education, especially in the rural areas, along with enabling people to understand a multitude of languages. we plan to make available offline search in our apps. also, we plan to make efforts towards improving this application to enable searching for words belonging to all languages which have a common interface via language detection. we also plan to inculcate word suggestions as they are being typed so that the user is presented with better lexical choices. plugins like perapera foot_7 for japanese and chinese are quite popular since they simply provide lexical information when the user hovers the mouse over words. implementing such a feature is something we plan to do in the immediate future. also, we would publish our application, and browser plugin source codes publicly for research purposes. figure 4: search results with malayalam, tamil, and telugu synsets figure 5: search results with english, bengali, and marathi synsets figure 6: browser extensions context menu for word 'specific' figure 7: browser extensions context menu for word 'िहं सा' (himsaa) translated to 'violence'