Abstract

This paper reports the work of creating bilingual mappings in English for certain synsets of Hindi wordnet, the need for doing this, the methods adopted and the tools created for the task. Hindi wordnet, which forms the foundation for other Indian language wordnets, has been linked to the English WordNet. To maximize linkages, an important strategy of using direct and hypernymy linkages has been followed. However, the hypernymy linkages were found to be inadequate in certain cases and posed a challenge due to sense granularity of language. Thus, the idea of creating bilingual mappings was adopted as a solution. A bilingual mapping means a linkage between a concept in two different languages, with the help of translation and/or transliteration. Such mappings retain meaningful representations, while capturing semantic similarity at the same time. This has also proven to be a great enhancement of Hindi wordnet and can be a crucial resource for multilingual applications in natural language processing, including machine translation and cross language information retrieval.