Hydra for Web: A Browser for Easy Access to Wordnets (2016)

Abstract: This paper presents a web interface for wordnets named Hydra for Web which is built on top of Hydra – an open source tool for wordnet development – by means of modern web technologies. It is a Single Page Application with simple but powerful and convenient GUI. It has two modes for visualisation of the language correspondences of searched (and found) wordnet synsets – single and parallel modes. Hydra for web is available at: http://dcl.bas.bg/bulnet/ .

## introduction as the wordnets of the world are growing in number, implementations, applications, and the complexity of the information encoded in their relational format, wordnets data need tools for flexible but also readily accessible and easy to comprehend visualisation. further, the tools used for creation of wordnets and visualisation of the lexicalsemantic information also have to consider the relational character of the wordnet data in order to give the users access to most of the rich data without further complications and without much hidden information, especially the information concerning the relations between the synonym sets and concepts these synonym sets encode. in the last decades, a number of web interfaces for browsing wordnet databases have been developed, with wordvis, mexidex, etc. among the most often used. additionally, many web tools (mainly dictionaries) which use wordnet (especially the english wordnet) as a database for definitions and information about synonyms are available (e.g., bee dictionary; lookwayup; a2zdefined; cozyenglish, among others). although based on wordnet, these dictionaries do not provide access to all the information about the re-lational organisation of the data which is one of the most valuable information in the wordnet. there are popular user interfaces that visualise wordnet relationships as graphs. wordvis (vercruysse and kuiper, 2013), for instance, do not support a parallel view of two or more wordnet language databases. besides, being based on modern visual technological solutions, wordvis still prevents the whole needed information to be readily accessible, especially for wordnet developers. there are also tools that support parallel view as graphs such as visual browser @xcite that can process wordnet synsets from a deb server storage to convert them into rdf notation for visualisation @xcite . in the deb platform environment, all the wordnets are stored on a debvisdic server; the client application supports a core module and individual modules for wordnets, so different data structure, workflow, external sources, etc. can be defined for each wordnet. the debvisdic was used as a basis for several multilingual projects including the global wordnet grid @xcite . he web interface is very complicated though it is really useful for wordnet developers and for tasks involving heavy linking between wordnets, ontologies, and other lexical and semantic resources. ## user interface and functionalities the hydra for web tool 1 is a web interface gui implementation for wordnet that uses as backend the freely accessible open source modal logic tool for wordnet development hydra @xcite . 2 the interface presented in this section is dependable on most of the functionalities of the hydra which uses a convenient relational model to present and manage linguistic resources with relational structure. hydra for web is designed as single page application that supports two modes -a single wordnet mode and parallel wordnets mode. currently, it allows users to make queries into a wordnet database containing the princeton wordnet (pwn) 3.0 @xcite , the bulgarian wordnet (bul-net) 3.0 @xcite , and the romanian wordnet (rown) @xcite ; the sentiwordnet data is in process of deployment. thus, the web tool allows for searching into the databases of different language wordnets with a single query. hydra for webs interface is currently available in english, bulgarian, and romanian. the names of the relations and other elements were manually translated into bulgarian (the part-of-speech -pos -and language markers -en, bg, ro -are still kept in english), and (partly) in romanian. however, as the interface supports internationalisation, it is possible for other languages to be used. the window has a top panel for switching the wordnets to be viewed which currently allows for the options of a single mode -only selected synset is visualized, and the three pairs of wordnets in the parallel wordnets mode, namely bulnet vs. pwn, bulnet vs. rown, and rown vs. pwn. however, the tool has functionalities that can further allow users to select and query any wordnet in the database. the search panel is also present in both single and parallel wordnets modes. it allows searching for an exact match of a word string -a single word such as [dance] as shown on fig. 1 ) or a multiword unit, e.g., [barn dance] -see fig. 2 . the non-exact match search returns any synset where the searched word string is found, as shown on fig. 2 where the search for [dance] returns 24 different synsets from the princeton word-figure 2: hydra for web -non-exact match search net database, among them two-word units such as [apache dance:1], three-word units such as [apache devil dance:1], and a hyphenated word string such as [counter-dance:1], etc. to limit the results shown, the search respects word (string) boundaries, i.e., the user can search only for whole words but not parts of the words (e.g., [dance] but not [danc] as this would return more than one hundred results -an option that is otherwise available in the hydra software for the purposes of wordnet development. this also means that searching for the string [dance] will not return [dancer] or [dancing] although this word string is only part of the derived word. ## applications the most obvious application of hydra for web is for queries into different wordnets, as well as for viewing parallel wordnet resources. such parallel data can be used for comparative lexical and other linguistic studies. it highlights the links between words and concepts. hydra for web is a convenient tool for using wordnet from every place, computer, phone or other device with internet connection. one obvious application, alongside the wordnet databases behind it, is as a multilingual dictionary. searching and return of single words and multiword units may help in building certain models for text identification and categorisation, word sense disambiguation, etc. the list of results (single words and multiword units) returned contains also information about other (synonym) words and the part-of-speech of the resulting words.