BWN- A software platform for developing Bengali wordnet

Abstract

Advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications are increasingly dependent on the availability of linguistic resources, ranging from digital lexica to rich tagged and annotated corpora. While these resources are readily available for digitally advanced languages such as English, these have yet to be developed for widely spoken but digitally immature languages such as Bengali. WordNet is a linguistic resource that can be used in, and for, a variety of applications from a digital dictionary to an automatic machine translator. To create a WordNet for a new language however is a significant challenge, not the least of which is the availability of the lexical data, followed by the software framework to build and manage the data. In this paper, we present BWN, a software framework to build and maintain a Bengali WordNet. We discuss in detail the design and implementation of BWN, concluding with a discussion of how it may be used in future to develop WordNets for other languages as well.