The WISIGOTH project aims at extracting lexical semantic resources from Wiktionary, the online collaborative dictionary, and enrich them for NLP purposes.
Wiktionary is multilingual and contains, besides usual lexemes' glosses and examples, semantic relations such as synonymy/antonymy, hypernymy/hyponymy, holonymy/meronymy.
However, these relations are quite rare.
The Wisigoth system includes a module that computes automatically new synonyms. This computation is based on random-walks over the graphs extracted from Wiktionary.
As the suggested synonyms may be relevant or irrelevant, they are to be manually validated or invalidated by contributors.
We have designed a Firefox extension that anybody can install, which:
suggests potential candidates when you browse a page of the English
or French Wiktionary ;
handles for you the edition of Wiktionary's articles if you decide to add or remove a given synonym ;
as you may want to add a synonym not appearing in the list of the suggested synonyms,
the extension includes a free text area into which you can type your own proposition.
Preview: Wisigoth's synonyms suggestion for beautiful
The "Download" link above enables you to download the WISIGOTH extension.
It is intended to be used by anyone willing to contribute to the online dictionary.
Below is given a list of links to some resources that may interest more specifically the NLP community:
XML Dumps: structured XML files extracted from 2010
dumps of the English and the French Wiktionary
E. Navarro, F. Sajous, B. Gaume, L. Prévot, S. Hsieh, I. Kuo, P. Magistry and Chu-Ren Huang (2009).Wiktionary and NLP: Improving synonymy networks.
In Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on The People's Web Meets NLP: Collaboratively Constructed Semantic Resources.
ACL-IJCNLP 2009, Singapore.
Development
See the versions history, known bugs and road map on the development page.