WordNet-Shp: Towards the Building of a Lexical Database for a Peruvian Minority Language

Abstract

WordNet-like resources are lexical databases with highly relevance information and data which could be exploited in more complex computational linguistics research and applications. The building process requires manual and automatic tasks, that could be more arduous if the language is a minority one with fewer digital resources. This study focuses in the construction of an initial WordNet database for a low-resourced and indigenous language in Peru: Shipibo-Konibo (shp). First, the stages of development from a scarce scenario (a bilingual dictionary shp-es) are described. Then, it is proposed a synset alignment method by comparing the definition glosses in the dictionary (written in Spanish) with the content of a Spanish WordNet. In this sense, word2vec similarity was the chosen metric for the proximity measure. Finally, an evaluation process is performed for the synsets, using a manually annotated Gold Standard in Shipibo-Konibo. The obtained results are promising, and this resource is expected to serve well in further applications, such as word sense disambiguation and even machine translation in the shp-es language pair.

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