Large-scale morphological databases provide essential input to a wide range of NLP applications. Inflectional data is of particular importance for morphologically rich (agglutinative and highly inflecting) languages, and derivations can be used, e.g. to infer the semantics of out-of-vocabulary words. Extending the scope of state-of-the-art multilingual morphological databases, we announce the release of MorphyNet, a high-quality resource with 15 languages, 519k derivational and 10.1M inflectional entries, and a rich set of morphological features. MorphyNet was extracted from Wiktionary using both hand-crafted and automated methods, and was manually evaluated to be of a precision higher than 98%. Both the resource generation logic and the resulting database are made freely available and are reusable as stand-alone tools or in combination with existing resources.
We set out to uncover the unique grammatical properties of an important yet so far under-researched type of natural language text: that of short labels typically found within structured datasets. We show that such labels obey a specific type of abbreviated grammar that we call the Language of Data, with properties significantly different from the kinds of text typically addressed in computational linguistics and NLP, such as ‘standard’ written language or social media messages. We analyse orthography, parts of speech, and syntax over a large, bilingual, hand-annotated corpus of data labels collected from a variety of domains. We perform experiments on tokenisation, part-of-speech tagging, and named entity recognition over real-world structured data, demonstrating that models adapted to the Language of Data outperform those trained on standard text. These observations point in a new direction to be explored as future research, in order to develop new NLP tools and models dedicated to the Language of Data.
We present a new wordnet resource for Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic minority language spoken by about 60,000 speakers, most of whom live in Northwestern Scotland. The wordnet contains over 15 thousand word senses and was constructed by merging ten thousand new, high-quality translations, provided and validated by language experts, with an existing wordnet derived from Wiktionary. This new, considerably extended wordnet—currently among the 30 largest in the world—targets multiple communities: language speakers and learners; linguists; computer scientists solving problems related to natural language processing. By publishing it as a freely downloadable resource, we hope to contribute to the long-term preservation of Scottish Gaelic as a living language, both offline and on the Web.
This paper introduces CogNet, a new, large-scale lexical database that provides cognates -words of common origin and meaning- across languages. The database currently contains 3.1 million cognate pairs across 338 languages using 35 writing systems. The paper also describes the automated method by which cognates were computed from publicly available wordnets, with an accuracy evaluated to 94%. Finally, it presents statistics about the cognate data and some initial insights into it, hinting at a possible future exploitation of the resource by various fields of lingustics.