RoWordNet – A Python API for the Romanian WordNet
Ștefan Daniel Dumitrescu, Andrei-Marius Avram, Luciana Morogan, Ștefan-Adrian Toma · 2018
The paper presents (1) a new library (API) that provides easy access to the Romanian WordNet and (2) an application based on the API to perform embedded vector retrofitting. The new API (further referred to as RoWn) is built in Python and offers direct access to all the data provided in the Romanian WordNet. It implements all basic I/O and query operations. As RoWn is based on a directed graph structure powered by the versatile networkx library, users are provided with the groundwork to implement powerful graph algorithms. The second part of the paper presents an application built on RoWn: the process of vector retrofitting. “Retrofitting” refers to the semantic specialization of word vectors, a process of fine-tuning each vector under a specified constraint. We use the synonymy/antonymy relations extracted from RoWn to tune the word vectors under these semantic constraints, effectively specializing the vector space.