Some Considerations in the Construction of a Historical Language W ord N et (2023)

Abstract: This article describes the manual construction of a part of the Old English WordNet (Old-EWN) covering the semantic field of emotion terms. This manually constructed part of the wordnet is to be eventually integrated with the automatically generated/manually checked part covering the whole of the rest of the Old English lexicon (currently under construction). We present the workflow for the definition of these emotion synsets on the basis of a dataset produced by a specialist in this area. We also look at the enrichment of the original Global WordNet Association Lexical Markup Framework (GWA LMF) schema to include the extra information which this part of the OldEWN requires. In the final part of the article we discuss how the wordnet style of lexicon organisation can be used to share and disseminate research findings/datasets in lexical semantics.

## introduction in this article, we look at the manual construction of that part of the old english wordnet (oldewn) dealing with the semantic field of emotion terms and which is based on previous scholarship on the emotion vocabulary for old english (oe). this completely manual compilation process contrasts with the rest of the oldewn which will be (primarily) the result of an initial phase of automated synset assignment followed by a subsequent postcorrection phase; in this latter phase, scholars and specialists in oe will check generated synsets for correctness using a specialised platform developed for this task; more details on the full resource can be found in @xcite . like the whole oldewn, the emotion sub-wordnet is based on the second edition of clark-hall's a concise anglo-saxon dictionary foot_0 (clark hall, 1916) (ch). we have several different aims in this article one of which is to describe some of the most recent developments in the construction of the oldewn as a historical wordnet resource (following on from @xcite ). more generally, however, we wish to take a closer look into how to use legacy lexicographic resources such as the ch to create wordnets for historical languages (we present our workflow in detail in section 2). in addition, we will present an extension of the global wordnet association (gwa) schema, in section 3, that includes diachronic and etymological information and which we have developed for our emotion subwordnet; this may be useful for other similar wordnet projects. finally, in section 4, we discuss how the wordnet style of lexicon organisation can be used to share and disseminate research data in lexical semantics and how, even in cases where the coverage of a wordnet resource is low, such subwordnets can still be highly useful if they cover whole semantic fields. ## manually creating an emotion lexicon in the old english wordnet note that as the current article concentrates on the manually compiled part of the oldewn dealing with emotions, and which we refer to as the emotion lexicon in what follows, we will not go into details as to the origins of the entire resource, its construction, or its scope 2 . the origin of the emotion lexicon lies in a dataset analysing emotion terms in oe which was compiled by díaz-vera and which is the result of a research program described in publications such as @xcite . in this dataset, which is organised in a series of spreadsheets, oe words with emotion related meanings are classified on the basis of the emotion terms listed in the geneva emotion wheel (gev) @xcite , with each word being listed in a separate spreadsheet under the appropriate gev emotion term. individual spreadsheets contain the following information for each of the lexical entries listed under that heading: for instance, in the spreadsheet listing shame related terms in oe, we currently have 77 entries. these include the noun scand which literally means 'shame', but also include the polysemic verb ablysian which means both 'to blush' and 'to be ashamed'. the lexical information in these spreadsheets is derived from several different sources but crucially, lemma and sense information is based on that given in the dictionary of old english (doe) foot_2 . having become aware of this dataset our feeling was that it would lend itself very well to being incorporated within the oldewn, especially since the lexical entries in the spreadsheets were already grouped together (provisionally) into synsets based on emotion terms. on the other hand, we were also eager to begin integrating the kind of information on figurative sense shifts included in the original díaz-vera dataset into oldewn and extending the basic wordnet framework in order to do so; indeed data on figurative sense shifts is already being added to the latin wordnet foot_3 . once we made the decision to build the emotion lexicon part of the oldewn on the basis of the díaz-vera dataset, we had to reconcile this with our previous choice to use the ch as the basis of the whole oldewn; this is further discussed in section 4. in what follows we give a description of our workflow for constructing the emotion lexicon 5 . in what follows we give a description of our workflow for the creation of the emotion lexicon. for each of the emotion words in a spreadsheet, we look for the corresponding entry in the ch; we then use the information contained in the latter as the basis of the oldewn lexical entry in the emotion lexicon foot_5 . in case either the entry or one or more of the senses does not exist in the ch we use another oe dictionary, the bosworth-toller an anglo-saxon dictionary (bosworth, 1882) (bt) as the basis of a new lexical entry and/or senses. as regards the creation of oe synsets in the emotion lexicon, we use the synset which is the closest modern day english equivalent to the word sense in question in the open english wordnet foot_6 (oewn) foot_7 as a reference. for instance, in the case of oe words in the shame spreadsheet we look for synsets in oewn containing the verb to shame, the noun shame, the adjective ashamed, etc. this gives us a set of relevant (modern) english synsets which we use as pivots to define new old english synsets: using the definitions in the ch (or the bt in case of missing definitions) to decide which synset to link to (this is a purely manual process for now). we then map our new old english synsets to their corresponding open english synsets using the latter's collaborative interlingual index id (described below in section 3). finally, we add information on figurative sense shifts between the entries at the level of the sense (rather than at the synset level) using a modified version of the gwa lmf format; see the next section for more details. ## extending the global wordnet lmf format the global wordnet association (gwa) formats were introduced by @xcite and @xcite to serve as a common set of schemata for the representation of wordnets and to enable their integration in the open multilingual wordnet 9 through the collaborative interlingual index (cili). the formats describe three fully convertible serializations: an xml format based on kyoto-lmf @xcite , a json serialization, and a rdf serialization that is a subset of the ontolex-lemon @xcite model. the three formats have been adopted by a number of projects and initiatives in the wordnet community including the oewn mentioned above. since all of the formats are fully interoperable and have the same underlying conceptual model, we focus on the xml based lmf format (gwa lmf) in what follows. these formats, which are closely based on the original princeton wordnet @xcite data model, model wordnets as containing lexical entries which have a number of senses that are linked to synsets 10 . as the formats are designed for the interchange of wordnets, they were developed with the goal of providing only a minimal number of common features. as such, the intention was for users to extend the set of elements in these schemas to represent their own data. and in fact, this is the strategy we pursued in order to be able to encode the oldewn, and in particular the emotion lexicon, as we describe next. ## conclusion in this article we have reported on some recent experiences of the authors' in the development of an emotion lexicon as an (enriched) part of a wordnet for old english. we are currently only part way through the encoding of the original díaz-vera dataset. when completed it will be made available in all three gwa formats as a separate wordnet