First Research (Yankesh)

Topic discussed on Monday 25th August 2008,
What is wordnet?
Where can wordnet be used, both internationally and locally?
Mauritian Creole as a language in Mauritius.
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WORDNET FOR MAURITIAN CREOLE

WordNet
WordNet is a dictionary and thesaurus which distinguishes between adverbs, verbs, nouns and adjectives because they follow grammatical rules. Synsets are connected to other synsets via a number of semantic relations.

Words can be connected to other words through lexical relation. The nouns and verbs are arranged by an ISA relation. WordNet does not include information about the origin and development of a word, pronunciations and forms of irregular verbs.

Neural networks algorithms can be used to search the expanded WordNet for related terms to disambiguate search keywords.

Mauritian Creole
This language often known as “Morisyen” is spoken by almost all the people in Mauritius. The nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs use in this language are often ambiguous. Some words have same pronunciation, and can be written in the same way, but they refer to an adjective or a verb. This criterion has to be taken into serious consideration in our WordNet system.

Uses of WordNet
• The Wordnet Enhanced Automatic Crossword Generation was created by Aoife Aherne and Carl Vogel, of the Computational Linguistics Group from the University Of Dublin, Ireland.

• WordNet is used to perform searches across search engines such as Yahoo, Google and Ask.com and many others.



WHERE CAN THIS WORDNET FOR MAURITIAN CREOLE BE USED??

The Nelson Mandela Centre for African Culture Trust Fund, is a cultural centre under the supervision of the Ministry of Arts and Culture. Its objectives and services provided are as follows:
• To preserve and promote African arts and culture.

• To preserve and promote Creole arts and culture.

• To collect, publish and disseminate information with respect to the African and Creole arts and culture.

• To organise lectures, seminars, workshops, exhibitions and any other activities leading to the better understanding of the African and Creole arts and culture.

There are more services which are provided but these three highlighted above best suits our project. Our software can be used there as a teaching toolkit for better comprehension of the Mauritian Creole.