Estonian Wordnet: Current State and Future Prospects
Heili Orav, Kadri Vare, Sirli Zupping · 2018
This paper presents Estonian Wordnet (EstWN) with its latest developments.We are focusing on the time period of 2011-2017 because during this time EstWN project was supported by the National Programme for Estonian Language Technology (NPELT 1 ).We describe which were the goals at the beginning of 2011 and what are the accomplishments today.This paper serves as a summarizing report about the progress of EstWN during this programme.While building EstWN we have been concentrating on the fact, that EstWN as a valuable Estonian resource would also be compatible in a common multilingual framework. Estonian Wordnet: Project ProgressEstonian Wordnet is a lexical-semantic resource describing Estonian words and their lexical relationships.The history of EstWN starts already in 1998 when Estonian team joined the EuroWord-Net (EWN) project (see also Vossen 1998).Back at 1998 the only available example was Princeton WordNet (PWN) (Fellbaum 1998), so the EWN project followed the same principles.The EWN added a completely new componentmultilingualitythe possibility to link different languages via a central InterLingualIndex (ILI) that was based on PWN version 1.5 at that time.At the beginning of 2011 the EstWN had reached around 40 000 concepts (including 10 000 synsets taken over automatically), by September 2017 there are around 85 000 concepts with 230 664 semantic relations and 135 497 senses in EstWN.Over the years EstWN project has been mainly supported by the National Programme for Estonian Language Technology, the first programme lasted from 2006-2010 and the second one from 2011-2017.We greatly appreciate that the Estonian government has realized that it is crucial to support the creation of Estonian language re-1 National Programme for Estonian Language, https://www.keeletehnoloogia.ee/en.