Developing the Persian Wordnet of Verbs Using Supervised Learning

Abstract

Nowadays, wordnets are extensively used as a major resource in natural language processing and information retrieval tasks. Therefore, the accuracy of wordnets has a direct influence on the performance of the involved applications. This paper presents a fully-automated method for extending a previously developed Persian wordnet to cover more comprehensive and accurate verbal entries. At first, by using a bilingual dictionary, some Persian verbs are linked to Princeton WordNet synsets. A feature set related to the semantic behavior of compound verbs as the majority of Persian verbs is proposed. This feature set is employed in a supervised classification system to select the proper links for inclusion in the wordnet. We also benefit from a pre-existing Persian wordnet, FarsNet, and a similarity-based method to produce a training set. This is the largest automatically developed Persian wordnet with more than 27,000 words, 28,000 PWN synsets and 67,000 word-sense pairs that substantially outperforms the previous Persian wordnet with about 16,000 words, 22,000 PWN synsets and 38,000 word-sense pairs.