Introduction

Hindi WordNet, Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) catalog number LDC2008L02 and isbn 1-58563-470-0, was developed by researchers at the Center for Indian Language Technology, Computer Science and Engineering Department, IIT Bombay.

Hindi, a member of the Indo-Iranian language family, is the primary national language of India and is spoken by approximately 500 million people making it the fifth largest language in the world. Inspired by the well-known English language Wordnet, Hindi Wordnet is the first wordnet for an Indian language. Wordnets are systems for analyzing the different lexical and semantic relations between words. Specifically, a wordnet is a word sense network in which words are grouped into sematically equivalent units called synsets. Each synset represents a lexical concept, and synsets are linked to each other by semantic relations (between synsets) and lexical relations (between words). Similar in design to the Princeton Wordnet for English, Hindi Wordnet incorporates additional features to capture the complexities of Hindi. This release of Hindi Wordnet consists of 56,928 unique words and 26,208 synsets.

Additional information about the development of Hindi Wordnet is available at the Hindi WordNet web site.

Data

Hindi WordNet contains nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Each entry consists of the following elements:

1. Synset: a set of synonymous words. For example, ?विद्यालय, पाठशाला, स्कूल? (vidyaalay, paaThshaalaa, skuul) represents the concept of school as an educational institution. The words in the synset are arranged according to the frequency of usage.

2. Gloss: the concept. It consists of two parts:

Text definition: It explains the concept denoted by the synset. For example, ?वह स्थान जहाँ प्राथमिक या माध्यमिक स्तर की औपचारिक शिक्षा दी जाती है? (vah sthaan jahaaM praathamik yaa maadhyamik star kii aupacaarik sikshaa dii jaatii hai) explains the concept of school as an educational institution.

Example sentence: It gives the usage of the words in the sentence. Generally, the words in a synset are replaceable in the sentence. For example,"इस विद्यालय में पहली से पाँचवीं तक की शिक्षा दी जाती है? (is vidyaalay me pahalii se pancvii tak kii shikshaa dii jaatii hai) gives the usage for the words in the synset representing school as an educational institution.

3. Position in Ontology: An ontology is a hierarchical organization of concepts, or more specifically, a categorization of entities and actions. A separate ontological hierarchy exists for each syntactic category (noun, verb, adjective adverb). Each synset is mapped into some place in the ontology..

This release of Hindi WorkNet is made available as a complete Java application along with an API to facilitate further development.

Content Copyright

Portions © 2007 IIT Bombay, © 2008 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania