Abstract

India is a country with 22 officially recognized languages and 17 of these have WordNets, a crucial resource. Web browser based interfaces are available for these WordNets, but are not suited for mobile devices which deters people from effectively using this resource. We present our initial work on developing mobile applications and browser extensions to access WordNets for Indian Languages. Our contribution is two fold: (1) We develop mobile applications for the Android, iOS and Windows Phone OS platforms for Hindi, Marathi and Sanskrit WordNets which allow users to search for words and obtain more information along with their translations in English and other Indian languages. (2) We also develop browser extensions for English, Hindi, Marathi, and Sanskrit WordNets, for both Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome. We believe that such applications can be quite helpful in a classroom scenario, where students would be able to access the WordNets as dictionaries as well as lexical knowledge bases. This can help in overcoming the language barrier along with furthering language understanding.