Bolette Sandford Pedersen, Sanni Nimb*, Anna BraaschUniversity of Copenhagen, * Danish Society for Language and LiteratureMerging specialist taxonomies and folk taxonomies in wordnets- a case study of plants, animals, and foods in the Danish wordnet
LREC 2010
* Introduction to DanNet Food taxonomies in DanNet based on DDO: ideal cases and problems
Interrelating natural and functional taxonomies in DanNet
Conclusions
Outline
LREC 2010
Joint work: University of Copenhagen & Society for Danish Language and Literature Monolingually-based approach: Danish lexical sources based on corpora: The Danish Dictionary (DDO); SIMPLE-DKInternational frameworks: Princeton WordNet, EuroWordNet60,000 synsets concepts200,000 semantic relationsOpen source download: wordnet.dk
DanNet a wordnet for Danish
LREC 2010
*DDO
Semi-automatic establishment of hyponym hierarchies by extraction of identified genus expressions in DDO Monolingual approach Introduction
LREC 2010
Princeton WordNet: large number of e.g. fishes and vegetables, represented with both an animal or plant sense as well as a food sense
-> same goal for edible animals and plants in DanNet: 2 hierarchies with a high number of synsets
Food taxonomies in DanNet based on DDO: ideal cases and problems
LREC 2010
Food taxonomies in DanNet based on DDO: ideal cases and problems
Reuse of DDO, ideal cases : edible plants and animals should have two separate senses in DDO with two different genus expressions:
1= plant/animal. Biological genus expression = animal, plant, part of animal, part of plant 2= food. Functional genus expression = food, meat, vegetable
LREC 2010
Food taxonomies in DanNet based on DDO: ideal cases and problemsGenus expression sense 1= gallinaceous birdGenus expression sense 2 = meat(turkey)
LREC 2010
Food taxonomies in DanNet based on DDO: ideal cases and problemsartichoke:only one sense genus expression: flower budpart of definition: edible, but no food sense establishedStudy: 74 DDO lemmas with polysemy plant/animal and food Conclusion: More than half demand manual treatment. Why?
(edible)(flower bud)(artichoke)
LREC 2010
Food taxonomies in DanNet based on DDO : ideal cases and problems
DDO = traditional -> zoological and botanical domains strongly influenced by professional descriptions: Preference given to biological senses (in spite of corpus evidence)Genus expression: Botanical/zoological terminology (tomato = fruit, spinach = herb, pheasant = gallinacean )
First version of DDO - a printed dictionary -> food sense left out due to space limitsDDO not ontology-driven -> descriptions made bottom up. -> No predefined vocabulary of definition-> No systematic treatment of regular polysemy
LREC 2010
Physical versus functional genus expressions
Observation: DDO definitions of concrete objects tend to use a physical genus expression (object, stick , ball ..) -> few functional genus expressions (toy, tool, equipment, food..) Examples, Princeton WordNet:
ball = round object that is hit or thrown or kicked in gamesBUT hypernym in WordNet = game equipment (NOT object)
doll = a small replica of a person, used as a toy. BUT hypernym in WordNet = toy (NOT replica)
Conclusion: Genus expressions are not fully reliable for the establishment of functional hierarchies
LREC 2010
Interrelating taxonomies in DanNet
Task of DanNet editors:
Establish regular polysemous synsets where missing in DDO in order to account for laymans food perspective
Harmonize the different DDO approaches in a consistent way
Ensure that clash of taxonomies does not mess up the general structure of the network
LREC 2010
Harmonize the different DDO approaches in a consistent way
We strive towards individual, but interrelated taxonomies in DanNet:
Food taxonomy of meat, vegetables and fruit i.e. FUNCTIONAL KINDS in Cruses terminology (Cruse 2002)
Botanical/zoological taxonomies (in practice incomplete) i.e. NATURAL KINDS in Cruses terminology
LREC 2010
Interrelating taxonomies
Encoding strategy in DanNet:Synsets interrelate with the two taxonomies either
By means of regular polysemy Example: lamb_1 (animal), lamb_2 (meat: food) or
By means of multiple inheritance Examples: tomato (fruit/part-of-plant AND vegetable: food) rubarb (stalk/part-of-plant AND fruit: food)
LREC 2010
Interrelating taxonomies
lamb_1tomato_1vegetablefruitlamb_2meatZoologicalFoodBotanicalFoodanimalRegular polysemy
LREC 2010
Not all concepts represented in both taxonomies
Only in food taxonomy:
grntsag (vegetable) rodfrugt (root vegetable) krydderurt (spice herb)suppeurt (potherb) vildt (game) flsk (pork) indmad (offals)
Only in natural taxonomy:
plante (plant) skrmplante (umbelliferous plant) rod (tuber) stilk (stalk) indvolde (entrails)
LREC 2010
Tricky cases ( false friends)
Examples of these are such as frugt (fruit)nd (nut)br (berry)
In principle, these cases should evoke two (unrelated) synsets, one in each taxonomy if you actually encode also the botanical ones
LREC 2010
Excerpt from Food taxonomy (offals and meat)
LREC 2010
Offals and their relations
LREC 2010
Conclusions (1)
Foods taxonomies are typically folk taxonomies emerged spontaneously depending on the goods available and on cooking traditions of a particular region. Inspired by and related to botanical and zoological taxonomiesThe fact that terms are taken over from these natural taxonomies causes problems that require a consistent frameworkMonolingual dictionaries do not always have a clear strategy
LREC 2010
Conclusions (2)
We have developed a framework that enables to distinguish and interrelate between the natural taxonomies and the functional taxonomies of the network.
Even if you have monolingual lexical resources that are inconsistent in this respect, the monolingual starting point is important in order to capture correct conceptual structures of a given language
Work in progress! See wordnet.dk and andreord.dk
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