Bolette Sandford Pedersen, Sanni Nimb*, Anna Braasch University of Copenhagen,

1. Merging specialist taxonomies and folk taxonomies in wordnets - a case study of plants, animals, and foods in the Danish wordnet Bolette Sandford Pedersen, Sanni Nimb*, Anna Braasch University of Copenhagen, * Danish Society for Language and Literature

2. Introduction to DanNet Food taxonomies in DanNet based on DDO: ideal cases and problems Interrelating natural and functional taxonomies in DanNet Conclusions Outline

3. Joint work: University of Copenhagen & Society for Danish Language and Literature Monolingually-based approach: Danish lexical sources based on corpora: The Danish Dictionary (DDO); SIMPLE-DK International frameworks: Princeton WordNet, EuroWordNet 60,000 synsets ≈ concepts 200,000 semantic relations Open source – download: wordnet.dk DanNet – a wordnet for Danish

4. DDO Introduction • Monolingual approach • Semi-automatic establishment of hyponym hierarchies by extraction of identified genus expressions in DDO

5. Princeton WordNet: large number of e.g. fishes and vegetables, represented with both an animal or plant sense as well as a food sense -> same goal for edible animals and plants in DanNet: 2 hierarchies with a high number of synsets Food taxonomies in DanNet based on DDO: ideal cases and problems

6. Food taxonomies in DanNet based on DDO: ideal cases and problems Reuse of DDO, ideal cases : edible plants and animals should have two separate senses in DDO with two different genus expressions: 1= plant/animal. Biological genus expression = ”animal”, ”plant”, ”part of animal”, ”part of plant” … 2= food. Functional genus expression = ”food”, ”meat”, ”vegetable” …

7. Food taxonomies in DanNet based on DDO: ideal cases and problems Genus expression sense 1= gallinaceous bird (turkey) Genus expression sense 2 = meat

8. Food taxonomies in DanNet based on DDO: ideal cases and problems artichoke: only one sense genus expression: flower bud part of definition: edible, but no food sense established Study: 74 DDO lemmas with polysemy plant/animal and food Conclusion: More than half demand manual treatment. Why? (artichoke) (flower bud) (edible)

9. Food taxonomies in DanNet based on DDO : ideal cases and problems • DDO = traditional -> zoological and botanical domains strongly influenced by professional descriptions: • Preference given to biologicalsenses (in spite of corpus evidence) • Genus expression: Botanical/zoologicalterminology • (tomato = fruit, spinach = herb, pheasant = gallinacean ) • First version of DDO - a printeddictionary-> • foodsenseleft out due to space limits • DDO not ontology-driven -> descriptions made ´bottom up’. • -> No predefined vocabulary of definition • -> No systematic treatment of regular polysemy

10. ‘Physical’ versus ‘functional’ genus expressions • Observation: DDO definitions of concrete objects tend to use a ‘physical’ genus expression (object, stick , ball ..) • -> few ’functional’ genus expressions (toy, tool, equipment, food..) • Examples, Princeton WordNet: • ‘ball’ = round object that is hit or thrown or kicked in games’ • BUT hypernym in WordNet = game equipment (NOT object) • ‘doll = a small replica of a person, used as a toy’. • BUT hypernym in WordNet= toy (NOT replica) • Conclusion: Genus expressions are not fully reliable for the establishment of functional hierarchies

11. Interrelating taxonomies in DanNet • Task of DanNet editors: • Establish regular polysemous synsets where missing in DDO in order to account for layman’s food perspective • Harmonize the different DDO approaches in a consistent way • Ensure that clash of taxonomies does not mess up the general structure of the network

12. Harmonize the different DDO approaches in a consistentway We strive towards individual, but interrelated taxonomies in DanNet: Food taxonomy of meat, vegetables and fruit i.e. FUNCTIONAL KINDS in Cruse’s terminology (Cruse 2002) Botanical/zoological taxonomies (in practice incomplete) i.e. NATURAL KINDS in Cruse’s terminology

13. Interrelatingtaxonomies Encodingstrategy in DanNet: Synsets interrelate with the two taxonomies either By means of regular polysemy Example: lamb_1 (animal), lamb_2 (meat: food) or By means of multiple inheritance Examples: tomato (fruit/part-of-plant AND vegetable: food) rubarb(stalk/part-of-plant AND fruit: food)

14. Interrelating taxonomies Zoological Food meat animal lamb_1 lamb_2 Regular polysemy Food Botanical vegetable fruit tomato_1

15. Not all conceptsrepresented in bothtaxonomies Only in foodtaxonomy: • grøntsag (vegetable) • rodfrugt (root vegetable) • krydderurt(spice herb) • suppeurt(potherb) • vildt(game) • flæsk (pork) • indmad (offals) Only in naturaltaxonomy: • plante(plant) • skærmplante(umbelliferous plant) • rod (tuber) • stilk(stalk) • indvolde(entrails)

16. Tricky cases (≈ false friends) Examples of these are such as frugt (fruit) nød (nut) bær (berry) In principle, these cases should evoke two (unrelated) synsets, one in each taxonomy if you actually encode also the botanical ones

17. Excerpt from Food taxonomy (offals and meat)

18. Offals and their relations

19. Conclusions (1) Foods taxonomies are typically folk taxonomies emerged spontaneously depending on the goods available and on cooking traditions of a particular region. Inspired by and related to botanical and zoological taxonomies The fact that terms are taken over from these natural taxonomies causes problems that require a consistent framework Monolingual dictionaries do not always have a clear strategy

20. Conclusions (2) We have developed a framework that enables to distinguish and interrelate between the natural taxonomies and the functional taxonomies of the network. Even if you have monolingual lexical resources that are inconsistent in this respect, the monolingual starting point is important in order to capture correct conceptual structures of a given language Work in progress! See wordnet.dk and andreord.dk