Constructing an Arabic Wordnet in Parallel with an Ontology

Constructing an Arabic Wordnet (AWN) in Parallel with an Ontology. Project partner of this project which aimed at the development of wordnets for the Arabic languages and was sponsored by the American government and headed by Princeton University. Vossen was responsible for the European development and coordination of building a lexical resource in Standard Arabic. AWN was constructed according to the methods developed for EuroWordNet (EWN;Vossen 1998) and since applied to dozens of languages around the world. The EuroWordNet approach maximizes compatibility across wordnets and focuses on manual encoding of the most complicated and important concepts. Arabic WordNet is mappable straightforwardly onto Princeton WordNet 2.0 and EuroWordNet, enabling translation on the lexical level to English and dozens of other languages. Several tools specific to this task will be developed. AWN will be a linguistic resource with a deep formal semantic foundation. Besides the standard wordnet representation of senses, word meanings are defined with a machine understandable semantics in first order logic. The basis for this semantics is the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) and its associated domain ontologies.