Latent semantic network induction in the context of linked example senses

Hunter Heidenreich and Jake Williams
Drexel University


Abstract

The Princeton WordNet is a powerful tool for studying language and developing natural language processing algorithms. With significant work developing it further, one line considers its extension through aligning its expert-annotated structure with other lexical resources. This work explores a completely data-driven approach to network construction, forming a wordnet using the entirety of the open-source, noisy, user-annotated dictionary, Wiktionary. Comparing baselines to WordNet, we find compelling evidence that our network induction process constructs a network with useful semantic structure. With thousands of semantically-linked examples that demonstrate sense usage from basic lemmas to multiword expressions (MWEs), we believe this work motivates future research.