S tar N et: A W ord N et Editor Interface (2023)

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce StarNet WordNet Editor, an open-source annotation tool designed for natural language processing. It’s mainly used for creating and maintaining machine-readable dictionaries like WordNet (Miller, 1995) or domain-specific dictionaries. WordNet editor provides a user friendly interface and since it is open-source, it is easy to use and develop. Besides English and Turkish WordNet (KeNet) (Bakay et al., 2020), it is also applicable to several languages and their domain specific dictionaries.

## introduction wordnets are natural language processing resources used in tasks like information retrieval or categorization. as a broad definition, a wordnet is a machine-readable dictionary with the lexicographic information of words including synsets and separate senses of those synsets. mainly, synsets are the single units that the semantic relations or mappings are built on. senses, on the other hand, are the definitions given for each synset. based on the idea that words can be explained by their relations to other words, wordnets offer basic semantic relations such as hypernymy, meronymy, or antonymy between synsets. after the princeton wordnet (pwn) @xcite several wordnets in different languages have been created. finnish wordnet finnword-net @xcite , polish word-net @xcite , and french wordnet wolf @xcite are some of the pioneering wordnets in the world. the multilingual wordnet eurowordnet (ewn) @xcite is another significant wordnet comprising seven european languages, namely english, dutch, italian, spanish, german, french, czech, and estonian. turkish, on the other hand, has mainly two word-nets; balkanet (tr-wordnet) @xcite and kenet @xcite . tr-wordnet of balkanet is the first wordnet of turkish and has 14,626 synsets, while kenet is currently the largest turkish wordnet with 76,757 synsets. wordnets can be presented or edited by software (editors) designed for this purpose. these editors are used to edit wordnets and they have a crucial role in correcting or updating items, matching synsets with their synonyms and composing semantic relations like hypernyms. starnet wordnet editor is one such software. it is designed to perform multipurpose functions in order to build, edit and group synsets and senses in wordnets. it has been primarily used for turkish and english. however, it is suitable to be used for any target language, regardless of the morphological complexity of the language across the analyticsynthetic spectrum. in this paper, we present our multi-functional wordnet editor starnet and discuss each of its functions and process applied to it. we present a literature review on editors in section 2, describe and discuss the functions of each component of our editor in sections 3 and 4, and present a conclusion in section 5. ## literature review originally intended to be manually consulted, the purpose of wordnets turned more towards automatic processing, and a need for interfaces to connect this resource onto different applications was born @xcite . visdic, developed by the team of czech wordnet @xcite and polaris @xcite and periscope @xcite , employed by eurowordnet are examples of softwares designed for this purpose. visdic is used for presenting and editing dictionaries stored in xml format and it's configurable with regards to program behaviour and dictionary design. polaris is used to create and edit wordnets, while periscope is used to view said wordnets. both are in addition used to export wordnets. however, when it comes to building wordnets from scratch, these softwares are not very convenient options. polaris is a licensed and rather expensive software that is no longer being developed and visdic is not optimized for building but rather presenting & editing wordnets. here we present a new, easy to use and open source alternative that can be used effectively to build new wordnets as well and view and edit existing ones. in creating and mapping wordnets, two main approaches are being used; the expand approach and the merge approach. the expand approach takes pwn as the base and translates it to the target language @xcite . once the relations are transferred from english, they are checked manually. french @xcite and finnish @xcite wordnets are examples of the expand approach. on the other hand, in the merge approach, pwn/english wordnet is not taken as the base. wordnets are created independently with intra-lingual relations and these are then linked to english. our approach is based on the merge approach like polish wordnet @xcite , russian wordnet @xcite , norwegian wordnet nornet @xcite and danish wordnet dannet @xcite . the expand approach is assumed to be a practical way for building a new wordnet in target languages, but it may be biased towards the imitated wordnet. merge approach, on the other hand, results in more concrete and accurate structures for languages that differ from english in their semantic patterns and potentially allows us to maintain language-specific properties @xcite , @xcite . we used five different editors for different components of a wordnet. this allows the user to modify these components independently of each other. our program works with xml format. it works as a desktop application and employs java for back end structure. it can thus be used with all major operating systems. in the following, we will explain how our program works component by component. ## discussion starnet wordnet editor stands as a robust and open source alternative for people looking to develop a new wordnet. it can be used to view and build a domain-specific wordnet as well as a wordnet for a new target language. being especially suitable for the merge approach, our editor will allow users to create new wordnets that preserve the languagespecific features, which is especially important for agglutinative languages such as turkish. our editor also allows direct matching between wordnet and the morphological analyzer. works on agglutinative languages such as turkish or hungarian, which may require exhaustive accuracy in morphological analysis for some expressions to be processed correctly in the wordnet, can particularly benefit from this feature. wordnet editor can be used on any operating system that supports java, including windows, linux and mac os. it is in this regard unique among open source tools developed as a wordnet interface. in addition to being available and having advantages for various platforms and languages, wordnet editor will present a user friendly interface for editing and maintaining a wordnet. ## conclusion in this paper, we introduced a multipurpose editor. the editor we present has features that can be useful in establishing accurate synonym/hypernym relations and building domain-specific dictionaries. for future work, we intend to use it in other target language wordnets and incorporate turkish framenet @xcite into this editor and make it able to create and edit frame relations of languages.