Sinitic W ordnet: Laying the Groundwork with C hinese Varieties Written in Traditional Characters (2018)

Abstract: The present work seeks to make the logographic nature of Chinese script a relevant research ground in wordnet studies. While wordnets are not so much about words as about the concepts represented in words, synset formation inevitably involves the use of orthographic and/or phonetic representations to serve as headword for a given concept. For wordnets of Chinese languages, if their synsets are mapped with each other, the connection from logographic forms to lexicalized concepts can be explored backwards to, for instance, help trace the development of cognates in different varieties of Chinese. The Sinitic Wordnet project is an attempt to construct such an integrated wordnet that aggregates three Chinese varieties that are widely spoken in Taiwan and all written in traditional Chinese characters.

## introduction as with romance languages descending from classical latin that stand on their own in present days, sinitic languages foot_0 , or major descendants of archaic chinese, have developed into fullyfledged languages without or with very limited mutual intelligibility @xcite . however, thanks to a shared logographic writing system that has not seen drastic changes in modern times foot_1 , speakers of distinct chinese languages can use a common set of logographic characters to communicate. as language is not merely a vehicle for the expression of thought, but the way to thought itself, writing systems not only represent a language, but reflect and record its ever-changing nature. as both linguists and wordnet builders, we see a great potential for wordnets to assist in lexical-semantic studies across chinese languages, synchronic and diachronic alike, and serve as a handy repository where logograph-based searches are enabled. in this paper, we present the initial version of a new resource named "sinitic wordnet", which not only includes the lexicons of mandarin, southern-min and hakka, but makes use of collaborative interlingual index to link them to other wordnet projects. ## methodology in this section, we explain how synsets were organized based on the dictionaries and how they were interlinked afterwards. ## results in this section, we show how it is possible to track in sinitic wordnet concepts that are encoded in different logographs, and vice versa. also, an entry is given the turtle format for the sake of illustration. ## publishing the resource once the wordnets and their mappings derived from this project are made more tidy, we will release the data under an open license in order to ensure that it can be put into use as widely as possibly. before that, we have made the resource available by integrating it with two best practices in the wordnet community, namely with the linguistic linked open data cloud and the collaborative interlingual index. foot_4 ## conclusion based on monolingual (mandarin to mandarin) and bilingual (southern-min/hakka to mandarin) dictionaries by the ministry of education, taiwan, we have presented a method for developing an integrated wordnet that includes and interlinks the lexicons of mandarin, southern-min and hakka. the resource was generated semi-automatically, relying on bilinguals of the chinese varieties to map synsets with princeton wordnet. to align the synsets, a mixture of methods was employed, including looking for synonyms in sense definitions, and translation equivalents in example words as well as in a section of the dictionaries that gives translation words in european and chinese languages. in addition to more thorough check-ups upon the integrity and quality of existing lexicons, our plans for future development include the addition of cantonese as spoken in hong kong, another chinese variety that is also written in traditional chinese characters, and the construction of a webbased graphical user interface for public access of sinitic wordnet.