Analysis of Lecxico-Semantic Relations of Punjabi Shahmukhi Nouns: A Corpus Based Study

Abstract

The current study is an effort in the development of Lecxico-semantic relations among Punjabi Shahmukhi nouns. Semantic relations are those nets, which are found among nouns on the bases of word meanings. Development of semantic nets is taken as a key part while developing WordNet of any language. The WordNet of Punjabi Shahmukhi is not developed yet. The digital exposure and progress of Punjabi Shahmukhi is very slow in comparison to other languages of the world. The present study explores the kind of semantic relations found among the nouns of Punjabi Shahmukhi. WordNet organizes words on the basis of word meanings rather than word forms. WordNet of English includes four open class categories including; nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives, but present study is limited to the analysis of nouns. A corpus of 2 million words of Punjabi Shahmukhi was taken from different sources. Then, it was POS tagged and a list of 846 nouns was generated. Then, each noun was analyzed individually to develop its Lecxico-semantic relations including: synonymy, antonymy, meronyms, holonymy, hyponymy, hypernymy, singular, plural, masculine, feminine and HAS a part. The present research is significant and useful in the development of WordNet for Punjabi Shahmukhi. With the development of WordNet, it will be possible to run digital applications in Punjabi Shahmukhi including: machine translation, information retrieval, querying archive and report generation to automatic speech recognition, data mining, read aloud, robotics and many more. On the other hand, WordNet will help to maintain an international status for Punjabi Shahmukhi.