Finding a Location for a New Word in WordNet

FinnWordNet is a Finnish wordnet which complies with the structure of the Princeton WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998). It was created by translating all the words in Princeton WordNet. It is open source and contains over 117 000 synsets. We are now testing different methods in order to improve and expand the content of FinnWordNet. Since wordnets are structured ontologies, a location for a word in FinnWordNet can be pinpointed by its relations to other words. To us, finding a location for a word therefore means finding a hyperonym, a hyponym or a synonym for the word. This article describes some methods for finding a location for a new word in FinnWordNet. Our methods include searching for multiword terms, compounds and lexicosyntactic patterns. Testing shows that with a few simple methods, we were able to find an indicator of the location for 83.2 % of new words. Out of the new synonym pairs we tested, we were able to find an indication for 86.7 %.