Feasibility of Automatically Bootstrapping a Persian WordNet

In this paper we describe a proof-of-concept for the bootstrapping of a Persian WordNet. This effort was motivated by previous work done at Stanford University on bootstrapping an Arabic WordNet using a parallel corpus and an English WordNet. The principle of that work is based on the premise that paradigmatic relations are by nature deeply semantic, and as such, are likely to remain intact between languages. We performed our task on a Persian-English bilingual corpus of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The corpus was neither aligned nor sense tagged, so it was necessary that these were undertaken first. A combination of manual and semiautomated methods were used to tag and sentence align the corpus. Actual mapping of English word senses onto Persian was done using automated techniques. Although Persian is written in Arabic script, it is an Indo-European language, while Arabic is a Central Semitic language. Despite their linguistic differences, we endeavor to test the applicability of the Stanford strategy to our task.