Seeing is Correcting: Curating lexical resources using social interfaces

Abstract

This note describes OpenWordnet-PT, an automatically created, manually curated wordnet for Portuguese and introduces the newly developed web interface we are using to speed up its manual curation. OpenWordNet-PT is part of a collection of wordnets for various languages, jointly described and distributed through the Open Multi- Lingual WordNet and the Global WordNet Association. OpenWordnet-PT has been primarily distributed, from the beginning, as RDF files along with its model description in OWL, and it is freely available for download. We contend the creation of such large, distributed and linkable lexical resources is on the cusp of revolutionizing multilingual language processing to the next truly semantic level. But to get there, there is a need for user interfaces that allow ordinary users and (not only computational) linguists to help in the checking and cleaning up of the quality of the resource. We present our suggestion of one such web interface and describe its features supporting the collaborative curation of the data. This showcases the use and importance of its linked data features, to keep track of information provenance during the whole life-cycle of the RDF resource.