Building WordNet for Afaan Oromoo

Abstract

WordNet is a lexical database which has many relations to disambiguate the sense of words for natural languages. From the WordNet relations synonyms and hyponym has major role for natural language processing and artificial intelligence applications. In this paper, word embedding (Word2Vec) and lexico-syntactic pattern (LSP) are developed to extract automatically synonyms and hyponyms respectively. For this study, the word embedding is evaluated on two specialized domain algorithms such as a continuous bag of words and Skip Gram algorithms and show superior results. Applying word embedding (Word2Vec) algorithms for Afaan Oromo texts has been registered 80.09% and 85.04% for the continuous bag of words and Skip Gram respectively. According to the result achieved in this study, the skip-gram algorithm does a better job for frequent pairs of words than a continuous bag of words. But, a continuous bag of words algorithm is faster while skip-gram is slower. A lexical syntactic pattern with the combination of Word2Vec and without Word2Vec is also evaluated using information retrieval evaluation metrics such as precision, recall and F-measure to extract hyponym relation from Afaan Oromoo texts. The precision, recall and F-measure have been registered by lexical syntactic patterns without the combination of Word2Vec is 66.73%, 72%, and 69.26% respectively and with the combination of Word2Vec 81.14%, 80.8%, and 81.1% have been registered for precision, recall and F-measure respectively. There are factors that could affect the accuracy of results: 1) the style of writer of Afaan Oromoo i.e. they write a noun phrase with many adjective to express the noun for the reader; and, 2) it is possible that some instances of the LSP are missed due to misspellings and other typographical errors.

Keywords: Afaan Oromoo WordNet, Word embedding, Lexico syntactic patterns, Extraction of WordNet relations.

DOI: 10.7176/CEIS/11-3-01

Publication date:May 31^st 2020