Documenting the Open Multilingual W ordnet (2023)

Abstract: In this project note we describe our work to make better documentation for the Open Multilingual Wordnet (OMW), a platform integrating many open wordnets. This includes the documentation of the OMW website itself as well as of semantic relations used by the component wordnets. Some of this documentation work was done with the support of the Google Season of Docs. The OMW project page, which links both to the actual OMW server and the documentation has been moved to a new location: https://omwn.org.

## introduction in this paper we present an ongoing effort to document the open multilingual wordnet @xcite , a multilingual platform that currently brings together 33 open, human-curated wordnets. 1 this is possible due to shared links to the princeton wordnet of english (pwn) @xcite , which serves as an interlingual interface. omw's main contributions consist of (i) creating a common format, (ii) building software that allows the display data from a multitude of wordnets, (iii) and encouraging people to choose open licenses. the aligned wordnet data can be 1 omw v1.4 had 33 wordnets: english @xcite ; albanian @xcite ; arabic @xcite ; chinese @xcite ; danish @xcite ; dutch @xcite ; finnish @xcite ; french @xcite ; hebrew @xcite ; icelandic @xcite ; indonesian and malaysian @xcite ; italian @xcite ; japanese @xcite ; norwegian (bokmål and nynorsk: lars nygaard 2012, p.c.); persian @xcite ; portuguese @xcite ; polish @xcite ; romanian @xcite ; swedish @xcite ; thai @xcite slovak and lithuanian @xcite ; and basque, catalan, galician and spanish from the multilingual common repository @xcite . omw v2 adds german @xcite , kurdish @xcite , kristang (morgado da costa, 2020), abui @xcite and cantonese @xcite . the ultimate goal of the omw is to produce a resource covering as many languages as possible, with as much useful information as possible. structurally, it is a collection of linked lexicons with a common format and interfaces. from an engineering point of view, we want to proceed in an incremental fashion, at each stage making the resource more useful. generally, language resources, to be useful, must be both accessible (legally usable) and usable (of sufficient quality, size and with a documented interface) @xcite . these ideas have become widespread through the fair data principles @xcite : findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. from the start, we have followed these principles: linking to open multilingual wordnet makes wordnets easy to find. this became even easier when we added the data to the widely used nltk foot_3 package. having a web interface and python library makes the data accessible. a shared, well-documented format makes the data inter-operable, and versioned releases on a stable platform (github foot_4 ) along with a variety of libraries to access it makes it easily reusable. our focus in this paper is the process and progress of creating the omw documentation (along with the software). wordnet projects have a long history of excellent documentation, either as man pages 7 , as on the princeton wordnet webpage foot_6 , or through technical reports @xcite and books @xcite @xcite . however, once a project has finished, the documentation typically does not get updated, even though the actual wordnets are maintained. despite the high quality of some of the wordnet documentation, there are still some major problems. specifically, the documentation is: (i) inconsistent across projects; (ii) not always up-to-date; (iii) hard to access online and (iv) not integrated with the wordnets or their interfaces. in answer to these challenges, the global wordnet association (gwa) foot_7 set up a working group on documentation, which includes the first five authors of this paper. 10 in section 2 we discuss these issues, and then in section 3 we outline our solutions. we link to the online documentation and interface at https://omwn.org . ## problems in the next section we discuss the problems in more detail, giving examples. ## shared documentation our solution to the above problems relies on two new initiatives. both are hosted on github, a wellfunded site with a good open source track record. github hosts code and other projects using the version control system git, and it also serves static webpages for these projects. github is backed up by the internet archive, as well as having snapshots stored in the arctic code vault, 12 so the data is well-preserved. the urls should also last for the foreseeable future, thus guarding against linkrot. the general documentation is supported by the global wordnet association documentation working group: having a group responsible rather than an individual project makes it more likely to be kept up-to-date, and having contributors from multiple projects makes sure attention is paid to consistency across different projects. further, the github infrastructure for raising issues and discussing them lowers the cost to keeping the documentation up-to-date. the actual task of writing the documentation requires considerable investment of time, and so for 2020 we applied for and received support from the google season of docs. 13 three technical writers helped contribute documentation for the wordnet structure, primarily semantic relations, and the open multilingual wordnet interface. ## https://github.blog/2020-07-16-github-archive-programthe-journey-of-the-worlds-open-source-code-to-the-arctic/ the interface is reactive, changing to fit different screen sizes and hyperlinks to examples and documentation. we give an example of using the python api in figure 3 . you can set the language to one of the languages for which we have documentation (currently english, japanese and polish). note that when information is missing in any particular language, it seamlessly backs off to giving the english documentation. all semantic relations from the latest release (version 1.2) of the global wordnet association lmf format 14 are documented. our long-term goal is to keep this documentation in sync with the schemas. ## future work in future work, we would like to add more languages to the documentation, and encourage its use in more projects. we strongly encourage more people to contribute to the documentation. at least some of the documentation of wordnet structure should probably be moved to the gwa documentation project, rather than being tied to the omw. for example, the documentation on parts of speech, sense relations, the glossary and so forth. we will also move the wordnets in the world and wordnet annotated corpora pages to the github site to make it easier for people to add new resources. ## conclusions in this project note we described an ongoing push to make better documentation for wordnets available online, through the documentation of the open multilingual wordnet (omw). this includes the documentation of the omw website itself and the semantic relations. some of this was done as part of the google season of docs. we sketched some ways we want to improve this even further in the future.