Complete and consistent annotation of WordNet using the top concept ontology

Abstract

This paper presents the complete and consistent ontological annotation of the nominal part of WordNet. The annotation has been carried out using the semantic features defined in the EuroWordNet Top Concept Ontology and made available to the NLP community. Up to now only an initial core set of 1,024 synsets, the so-called Base Concepts, was ontologized in such a way. The work has been achieved by following a methodology based on an iterative and incremental expansion of the initial labeling through the hierarchy while setting inheritance blockage points. Since this labeling has been set on the EuroWordNet's Interlingual Index (ILI), it can be also used to populate any other wordnet linked to it through a simple porting process. This feature-annotated WordNet is intended to be useful for a large number of semantic NLP tasks and for testing for the first time componential analysis on real environments. Moreover, the quantitative analysis of the work shows that more than 40% of the nominal part of WordNet is involved in structure errors or inadequacies.