Semi-automatic Endogenous Enrichment of Collaboratively Constructed Lexical Resources: Piggybacking onto Wiktionary

The lack of large-scale, freely available and durable lexical resources, and the consequences for NLP, is widely acknowledged but the attempts to cope with usual bottlenecks preventing their development often result in dead-ends. This article introduces a language-independent, semi-automatic and endogenous method for enriching lexical resources, based on collaborative editing and random walks through existing lexical relationships, and shows how this approach enables us to overcome recurrent impediments. It compares the impact of using different data sources and similarity measures on the task of improving synonymy networks. Finally, it defines an architecture for applying the presented method to Wiktionary and explains how it has been implemented.