Building Slovene WordNet

A WordNet is a lexical database in which nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized in a conceptual hierarchy, linking semantically and lexically related concepts. Such semantic lexicons have become one of the most valuable resources for a wide range of NLP research and applications, such as semantic tagging, automatic word-sense disambiguation, information retrieval and document summarisation. Following the WordNet design for the English language developed at Princeton, WordNets for a number of other languages have been developed in the past decade, taking the idea into the domain of multilingual processing. This paper reports on the prototype Slovene WordNet which currently contains about 5,000 top-level concepts. The resource has been automatically translated from the Serbian WordNet, with the help of a bilingual dictionary, synset literals ranked according to the frequency of corpus occurrence, and results manually corrected. The paper presents the results obtained, discusses some problems encountered along the way and points out some possibilities of automated acquisition and refinement of synsets in the future.