The WordNet in Indian Languages

This contributed volume discusses in detail the process of construction of a WordNet of 18 Indian languages, called “Indradhanush” (rainbow) in Hindi. It delves into the major challenges involved in developing a WordNet in a multilingual country like India, where the information spread across the languages needs utmost care in processing, synchronization and representation. The project has emerged from the need of millions of people to have access to relevant content in their native languages, and it provides a common interface for information sharing and reuse across the Indian languages. 

The chapters discuss important methods and strategies of language computation, language data processing, lexical selection and management, and language-specific synset collection and representation, which are of utmost value for the development of a WordNet in any language. The volume overall gives a clear picture of how WordNet is developed in Indian languages and how this can be utilized in similar projects for other languages. It includes illustrations, tables, flowcharts, and diagrams for easy comprehension.  

This volume is of interest to researchers working in the areas of language processing, machine translation, word sense disambiguation, culture studies, language corpus generation, language teaching, dictionary compilation, lexicographic queries, cross-lingual knowledge sharing, e-governance, and many other areas of linguistics and language technology.

Niladri Sekhar Dash, Ph.D., is Associate Professor, Linguistic Research Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. He is also Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Advanced Linguistic Studies, principal investigator of the Indian Languages Corpora Initiative-Bengali and the Digital Bangla Pronunciation Dictionary. His main areas of research are: corpus linguistics, natural language processing, computational, lexicography, machine translation, WordNet design and development, lexical semantics,  computer assisted language teaching, digital language resource development, language documentation and digitization, etc.

Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Ph.D., is  Director, Indian Institute of Technology Patna. Previously, he was Vijay and Sita Vashee Chair Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai; consortium leader of the Indradhanush WordNet in Indian languages; Associate Editor, ACM Transaction on Asian Language Information Processing; leader of multi-institute consortia projects on Indian language WordNets, Indian language search engine, and machine translation. Professor Bhattacharyya has been a visiting professor at Stanford University (2004), University of Grenoble (2005, 2009 and 2011) and distinguished lecturer at the University of Houston (2012). His research areas are: natural language processing, machine learning, cross lingual IR, information extraction, WordNet design and development, etc.

Jyoti  D. Pawar is Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Goa University, Goa. She is co-consortium leader of the Indradhanush WordNet in Indian languages. Her research areas are: natural language processing (NLP), data mining, data structures, etc.