An automatic approach for WordNet enrichment applied to arabic WordNet

Abstract

This paper introduces an automatic method to extend existing WordNets via machine translation. Our proposal relies on the hierarchical skeleton of the English Princeton WordNet (PWN) as a backbone to extend their taxonomies. Our proposal is applied to the Arabic WordNet (AWN) to enrich it by adding new synsets, and also by providing vocalizations and usage examples for each inserted lemma. Around 12000 new potential synsets can be added to AWN with a precision of at least 93%. As such the coverage of AWN in terms of synsets can be increased from 11269 to around 24000 a very promising achievement on the path of enriching the Arabic WordNet.