This paper reports the work related to making Hindi Wordnet1 available as a digital resource for language learning and teaching, and the experiences and lessons that were learnt during the process. The language data of the Hindi Wordnet has been suitably modified and enhanced to make it into a language learning aid. This aid is based on modern pedagogical axioms and is aligned to the learning objectives of the syllabi of the school education in India. To make it into a comprehensive language tool, grammatical information has also been encoded, as far as these can be marked on the lexical items. The delivery of information is multi-layered, multi-sensory and is available across multiple digital platforms. The front end has been designed to offer an eye-catching user-friendly interface which is suitable for learners starting from age six onward. Preliminary testing of the tool has been done and it has been modified as per the feedbacks that were received. Above all, the entire exercise has offered gainful insights into learning based on associative networks and how knowledge based on such networks can be made available to modern learners.

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is one of the open problems in the area of natural language processing. Various supervised, unsupervised and knowledge based approaches have been proposed for automatically determining the sense of a word in a particular context. It has been observed that such approaches often find it difficult to beat the WordNet First Sense (WFS) baseline which assigns the sense irrespective of context. In this paper, we present our work on creating the WFS baseline for Hindi language by manually ranking the synsets of Hindi WordNet. A ranking tool is developed where human experts can see the frequency of the word senses in the sense-tagged corpora and have been asked to rank the senses of a word by using this information and also his/her intuition. The accuracy of WFS baseline is tested on several standard datasets. F-score is found to be 60%, 65% and 55% on Health, Tourism and News datasets respectively. The created rankings can also be used in other NLP applications viz., Machine Translation, Information Retrieval, Text Summarization, etc.

This paper reports the work of creating bilingual mappings in English for certain synsets of Hindi wordnet, the need for doing this, the methods adopted and the tools created for the task. Hindi wordnet, which forms the foundation for other Indian language wordnets, has been linked to the English WordNet. To maximize linkages, an important strategy of using direct and hypernymy linkages has been followed. However, the hypernymy linkages were found to be inadequate in certain cases and posed a challenge due to sense granularity of language. Thus, the idea of creating bilingual mappings was adopted as a solution. A bilingual mapping means a linkage between a concept in two different languages, with the help of translation and/or transliteration. Such mappings retain meaningful representations, while capturing semantic similarity at the same time. This has also proven to be a great enhancement of Hindi wordnet and can be a crucial resource for multilingual applications in natural language processing, including machine translation and cross language information retrieval.