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Dbnary: Wiktionary as a LMF based Multilingual RDF network

Summary

Wiktionary is a large, free, multilingual dictionary with definitions and many translations. Its entries, however, are written in MediaWiki markup that describes page layout rather than lexical structure. Each language edition follows its own conventions, and these change over time, so earlier ad-hoc extractions quickly went stale. Sérasset presents dbnary, an open-source extractor that builds a lexical network from the English, French and German Wiktionary dumps.

Each page is parsed by a Java finite-state automaton. A shared abstract class captures the common entry layout, and language-specific subclasses handle each edition's details. Rather than forcing all editions into one uniform but impoverished schema, dbnary uses a simple LMF-inspired model of entries, lemmas, senses, definitions, lexico-semantic relations and translation equivalents. The output is published as RDF.

The resulting networks range from about 1 million to 2.1 million nodes per edition. Because the data is in RDF, it works directly with Semantic Web tools such as SPARQL engines and reasoners, and it can support multilingual ontology alignment. The stated long-term aim is to be for Wiktionary what dbpedia is for Wikipedia.

Key points

  • Inputs and performance:
    • The input dumps measured 4.1 Gb for the English edition, 3.1 Gb for the French one, and 631 Mb for the German one.
    • Extracting the full English edition takes about 4 minutes on a 2.67 GHz Intel Xeon with roughly 800 Mb of RAM, since the whole network is held in memory.
  • Network sizes:
    • English: 2,102,780 nodes, including 414,929 entries and 497,204 translation equivalents.
    • French: 1,669,375 nodes.
    • German: 1,040,105 nodes.
  • Data model:
    • Homonyms stay grouped under a single Wiktionary page entry.
    • Translations are kept even when they cannot be reliably tied to a specific sense.
    • Quasi-synonyms (qsyn) appear only in the French edition.
  • Known issues:
    • German has an unexpectedly high relation count (215,085), possibly caused by nested macros that the automata parse poorly.
    • The English extractor does not yet handle inflected forms correctly.
  • Availability: Data is at kaiko.getalp.org/dbnary and code at dbnary.forge.imag.fr. Portuguese support is in progress, and the work was funded under ANR's Videosense project.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: AI & machine learning

Topics Multilingual & cross-lingual NLP Knowledge graphs & ontologies

 Institutions

🔬Laboratoire d'Informatique de GrenobleGrenoble · France6 works · 510 citations🎓Université Joseph FourierGrenoble · France2 works · 75 citations

Cite

Cite as Gilles Sérasset. 2012. Dbnary: Wiktionary as a LMF based Multilingual RDF network. Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{serasset2012dbnary,
  title = {{Dbnary: Wiktionary as a LMF based Multilingual RDF network}},
  author = {Gilles Sérasset},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)},
  year = {2012},
  doi = {10.63317/4byhan5jtqdz},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/4byhan5jtqdz}
}

References

14 references, 2 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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