Automatic Construction of Wordnets by Using

WordNet is one of the most valuable lexical resources in the Natural Language Processing community. Unfortunately, the benefits of building a WordNet for the Macedonian language have never been recognized. Due to the time and labor intensive process of manual building of such a lexical resource, we were inspired to develop a method for its automated construction. In this paper, we present a new method for construction of non-English WordNets by using the Princeton implementation of WordNet as a backbone for their construction along with Google’s translation tool and search engine. We applied the new method for construction of the Macedonian WordNet and managed to develop a WordNet containing 17,553 words grouped into 33,276 synsets. However, the method in consideration is general and can also be applied for other languages. Finally, we report the results of an experiment using the Macedonian WordNet as a means to improve the performance of the text classification algorithms. Avtomatska izdelava wordneta z uporabo strojnega prevajanja in jezikovnega modeliranja Wordnet velja za enega najbolj uporabnih leksikalnih virov na področju računalniške obdelave naravnega jezika, vendar za makedonščino še ne obstaja. Ker je ročna izdelava tovrstnega vira izjemno dolgotrajna in draga, smo se odločili za gradnjo z avtomatskimi pristopi. V prispevku predstavljamo metodo za izdelavo wordneta v izbranem ciljnem jeziku, pri čemer izhajamo iz angleškega Prinecton WordNeta, za generiranje sinsetov pa uporabimo dvojezični slovar, Googlov spletni strojni prevajalnik in iskalnik. Čeprav je na ta način mogoče izdelati wordnet za kateri koli jezik, smo v pričujoči raziskavi generirali makedonski wordnet, ki vsebuje 17.553 besed oz. 33.265 sinsetov. Izdelan wordnet tudi preizkusimo na sistemu za avtomatsko klasifikacijo besedil in s tem preverimo njegovo uporabnost v praksi.