Constructing a WordNet for Turkish using manual and automatic annotation

Abstract

In this article, we summarize the methodology and the results of our 2-year-long efforts to construct a comprehensive WordNet for Turkish. In our approach, we mine a dictionary for synonym candidate pairs and manually mark the senses in which the candidates are synonymous. We marked every pair twice by different human annotators. We derive the synsets by finding the connected components of the graph whose edges are synonym senses. We also mined Turkish Wikipedia for hypernym relations among the senses. We analyzed the resulting WordNet to highlight the difficulties brought about by the dictionary construction methods of lexicographers. After splitting the unusually large synsets, we used random walk-based clustering that resulted in a Zipfian distribution of synset sizes. We compared our results to BalkaNet and automatic thesaurus construction methods using variation of information metric. Our Turkish WordNet is available online.