Open English NameNet: Extending English Wordnet with Names

Abstract

We present Open English NameNet, a new large-scale lexical resource that extends Open English Wordnet with named entities derived from Wikidata. While English Wordnet has historically included many proper nouns, its coverage has been incomplete and inconsistent, and encyclopedic knowledge sources have grown rapidly in parallel. To address this gap, we systematically extract and align named entities from Wikidata with the Open English Wordnet hierarchy, ensuring each entity is appropriately placed through instance hypernym relations. Our methodology combines existing WordNet–Wikipedia mappings with Wikidata information and applies domain-specific strategies for people, plants and animals, and languages, to account for structural and semantic differences between the resources. This approach results in the largest English lexical-semantic resource currently available, with extensive coverage and structured integration. We release the resource openly to support the development of lexically and encyclopedically informed language technologies.

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