Nordic and Baltic wordnets aligned and compared through "WordTies"

During the last few years, extensive wordnets have been built locally for the Nordic and Baltic languages applying very different compilation strategies. The aim of the present investigation is to consolidate and examine these wordnets through an alignment via Princeton Core WordNet and thereby compare them along the measures of taxonomical structure, synonym structure, and assigned relations to approximate to a best practice. A common web interface and visualizer “WordTies” is developed to facilitate this purpose. Four bilingual wordnets are automatically processed and evaluated exposing interesting differences between the wordnets. Even if the alignments are judged to be of a good quality, the precision of the translations vary due to considerable differences in hyponymy depth and interpretation of the synset. All seven monolingual and four bilingual wordnets as well as WordTies have been made available via META-SHARE through the META-NORD project.