LexBank: A Multilingual Lexical Resource for Low-Resource Languages

Abstract

In this dissertation, we present new methods to create essential lexical resources for low-resource languages. Specifically, we develop methods for enhancing automatically created wordnets. As a baseline, we start by producing core wordnets, for several languages, using methods that need limited freely available resources for creating lexical resources. Then, we establish the semantic relations between synsets in wordnets we create. Next, we introduce a new method to automatically add glosses to the synsets in our wordnets. Our techniques use limited resources as input to ensure that they can be felicitously used with languages that currently lack many original resources. Most existing research works with languages that have significant lexical resources available, which are costly to construct. To make our created lexical resources publicly available, we developed LexBank which is a web-based system that provides language services for several low-resource languages.