First Research (Ved)

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

What is WordNet?

· A large lexical database, or electronic dictionary

· Covers most English nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs

· Electronic format enables automatic manipulation

WordNet v/s Paper Dictionaries

· Traditional paper dictionaries are organized alphabetically, so words that are grouped together (on the same page) are unrelated

· WordNet is organized by meaning, so words in close proximity are related

· Users can browse WordNet and find words that are meaningfully related to their queries (like in a thesaurus) ^Ref1

Uses of WordNet

All systems which use WordNet include

· Sense disambiguation (The process of identifying which sense of a word is used in a given sentence)

· Information Extraction & Retrieval

· Prepositional Attachment (Prepositional phrase attachment is a common cause of structural ambiguity in natural language)

· Textual Summarization (Consists of the following processes: Topic analysis, Passage Extraction, Text Understanding and Information Integration)

· Recognition of Textual Cohesion (more research will follow on this)

· Intelligent Internet Searches ^Ref2

Mauritian Creole

Kreol Morisyen, the language of Mauritius

Mauritius has a very complex linguistic situation. While English is the official language of parliament, traffic regulations and school administration, it is spoken by only 3% of the population. French is the native language and 80% of our newspapers are written in French. Furthermore, we have other languages like Urdu, Chinese, Hindi, Bhojpuri, etc… Mauritian Creole, or MC, is the national language, and it is spoken by nearly the entire population.

The majority of MC words are of French origin, while some are derived from English, Indian Languages, Malagasy and Chinese.

Derived from French-lexicon creoles, some examples of MC are “livere” (winter), derived from the French “l’hiver”, and “dilo” (water) from “de l’eau”. ^Ref3

Future implementation of WordNet for Mauritian Creole

1) Nelson Mandela Centre for African Culture Trust Fund

Objectives/Services

….

-To preserve and promote Creole Arts and Culture

….^{Ref 4}

2) Nelson Mandela Centre for African Culture

Documentation and Research

We could Wordnet for Mauritian Creole as a Research field that could later provide other people the opportunity to expand the Creole vocabulary and enhance our Wordnet for Mauritian Creole.

3) Ministry of Arts and Culture

We could create and provide this software as a key step for the promotion of the Creole language as we already have our Creole Dictionary^Ref5. This software would provide the ideal Creole WordNet as an analogy to the English WordNet.