Towards a Swedish Roget-Style Thesaurus for NLP

Abstract

Bring’s thesaurus (Bring) is a Swedish counterpart of Roget, and its digitized version could make a valuable language resource for use in many and diverse natural language processing (NLP) applications. From the literature we know that Roget-style thesauruses and wordnets have complementary strengths in this context, so both kinds of lexical-semantic resource are good to have. However, Bring was published in 1930, and its lexical items are in the form of lemma–POS pairings. In order to be useful in our NLP systems, polysemous lexical items need to be disambiguated, and a large amount of modern vocabulary must be added in the proper places in Bring. The work presented here describes experiments aiming at automating these two tasks, at least in part, where we use the structure of an existing Swedish semantic lexicon – Saldo – both for disambiguation of ambiguous Bring entries and for addition of new entries to Bring.

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