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Introducing Filipino WordNet

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Introducing Filipino Wordnet

Allan Borra Adam Pease Rachel Edita. O. Roxas Shirley Dita


Center for Language Articulate Software Center for Language Department of English and
Technologies Angwin, CA, USA Technologies Applied Linguistics
College of Computer apease@articulatesoft- College of Computer College of Education
Studies ware.com Studies De La Salle University,
De La Salle University, De La Salle University, Manila Philippines
Manila, Philippines Manila, Philippines shirley.dita@dlsu.edu.ph
borgz.borra rachel.roxas
@delasalle.ph @delasalle.ph

Abstract 2.1 Filipino Language


Tagalog is a language in the Austronesian group
In this paper, we introduce the Filipino word- of languages, and is, de facto, the basis for the
net project (FilWordNet). Filipino is the na- national language of the Philippines, called Fil-
tional language of the Philippines spoken by ipino. Tagalog is a free word order language, and
some 90 million people as their first or second is somewhat agglutinative with a rich set of af-
language. However, it has historically had a fixes, and as such, so is Filipino. The interested
limited number of computational linguistics
reader is referred to (Schacter&Otanes, 1972) for
resources. Creating the Filipino wordnet can
be seen as the first step to enable a wide range
more information about Tagalog grammar..
of research projects. We describe our process As in many wordnet projects, the first step is
of building a wordnet, including issues with to determine what words deserve to be synsets
the Filipino language itself, its morphology and which are morphological extensions of the
and structure. root.
To take cases in English to illustrate this,
1 Introduction 'walked' is simply the past tense of 'walk', and
does not have additional meaning. In contrast,
We discuss the construction of a WordNet for while 'catfish' is a fish that looks somewhat like a
Filipino. Morphology is discussed to establish cat, there is no automatic way to know that is the
the need for analyzers and generators to support case, and not that it is a cat that looks like a fish,
root word entries in the Wordnet as well as or a cat that likes fish. These facts would en-
sysnset entries in root word form. Other aspects courage an English wordnet to include 'walk' but
are investigated such as idiosyncratic and cultur- not 'walked', and to include 'cat', 'fish' and 'cat-
ally unique words in Filipino. fish' all as separate synsets.
The following examples illustrate morphologi-
2 Background cal phenomena in Filipino. In each case, we illus-
The motivation for the creation of Filipino trate different affixes that affect the focus of the
Wordnet is to provide a solid base of formal lin- verb, as well as enumerating the different tenses
guistic information that could subsequently be or aspect for each verb with a given focus. Verb
used for pertinent language technology applica- focus has no direct analog in English, other than
tions as outlined by (Morato et al., 2004) . These possibly a prosodic emphasis (Szwedek, 1986).
include information retrieval and extraction, par- Verb focus indicates to the listener where to
ticularly in concept identification in natural lan- place the focus of attention in a sentence
guage and in query expansion, language teach- Take for example the case of the root word
ing, translation applications, and in parameteriz- bili ‘to buy’ in actor focus. This focus indicates
able information systems which allowed personal to the listener that the attention should be on the
searching of documents based on users’ interests. performer of the action. For actor focus, Filipino
While there has been at least one earlier proposal uses the infix –um-
for a Filipino WordNet (Tan&Lin, 2007), the
proposed work was not performed. Bumili = ‘bought’ – perfective (Bumili ang
bata ng kendi. ‘The child bought a
candy.’)
Bumibili = ‘is/are buying’ – the -um- focus ticular root. We believe that a morphological an-
marker + consonant-vowel alyzer is a better approach in modeling Filipino
reduplication yield progressive aspect words than storing all of the inflections of a root
(Bumibili ang bata ng kendi. ‘The word in the wordnet as different synsets.
child is buying a candy.’). Our initial approach is to be strict in only al-
Bibili = ‘will buy’ – consonant-vowel lowing root forms in the wordnet, unless the
reduplication yields word has gained some meaning that cannot be
imperfective (or contemplated, automatically deduced from the root and any af-
unrealized) aspect fixes.
(Bibili ang bata ng kendi. ‘The child
will buy a candy.’) Note that rather Uniquely Filipino words
confusingly for the non-native It is very often the case that each new wordnet
speaker, the infix disappears in this will have synsets that do not appear in most or
aspect. even any other existing wordnet (Elkateb et al,
2007). This is also true with Filipino. Let us take
In each case, one can imagine an English a few examples.
speaker placing an emphasis through loudness or
pitch on 'child'. tinikling – a cultural dance that originated in
For benefactive focus Filipino uses a prefix i- the Visayas region utilizing two moving bamboo
+ infix -in-. Note that the future tense shifts the sticks over which the dancers perform
affix to the end of the word. Benefactive focus bayanihan – the spirit of communal unity
indicates that the focus of attention of the listener bilas – spouse of the brother or sister of one’s
should be on the entity that benefits from the ac- own spouse
tion. hilamos – to wash one’s face

Ibinili = 'bought' - perfective (Ibinili ng bata Words such as these form part of the motiva-
ng kendi ang beybi. ‘The child tion for using a formal ontology. While some
bought a candy for the baby.’) wordnets have used English as an interlingua and
Ibinibili = 'is/are buying' – progressive/ created phrases to stand in the place of otherwise
on-going – (Ibinibili ng bata ng unlexicalized concepts, in our work, we use
kendi ang beybi. 'The child is SUMO as an interlingua which can contain con-
buying a candy for the baby.') cepts which stand for the lexicalized concepts of
Ibibili = 'will buy' – imperfective – any particular language. For example, rather
(Ibibili ng bata ng kendi ang than add a new English synset corresponding to
beybi. 'The child will buy candy “spouse of the brother or sister of one’s own
for the baby.') spouse”, we create a concept in SUMO with that
definition and relate the Filipino synset to it.
In each case, one can imagine an English This avoid creating synsets in a given language
speaker placing an emphasis through loudness or that are “artificial” and not actually lexicalized
pitch on 'baby'. units. To use the example above of “hilamos”,
From here, we can complicate the morphology consider Figure 1
a bit by adding other morphemes, with the exam-
ple maipabibili (I will be able to have him buy
(something))

ma- = abilitative prefix (to be able to)


i- = benefactive topic marker
(beneficiary of the action is the focus)
pa- = causative marker
bi = aspect marker (imperfective) -
consonant-vowel reduplication form Figure 1: Relation among FilWordNet,
bili = root SUMO and Princeton's English WordNet
These examples provide an insight as to the “Hilamos” is a word not lexicalized in Eng-
effect of different affixes when applied to a par- lish, so above we show it as a term only linked to
SUMO.
We should note that the equivalence relation is The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology
an informal one. It is neither wordnet semantic (SUMO) (Pease&Niles, 2002),(Niles&Pease,
link nor a formal logical link as would be found 2001) is a freely available, formal ontology of
in SUMO, rather it is a relationship without strict about 1000 terms and 4000 definitional state-
definition but denoting intuitively very close ments. It is provided in a first order logic lan-
similarity to the point of equivalence. We also guage called Standard Upper Ontology Knowl-
show the relationship subclass in SUMO which edge Interchange format (SUO-KIF) (Pease,
is a formal and truth-preserving relationship, and 2000), and also has a necessarily lossy transla-
the hypernym relationship which is one of word- tion into the OWL semantic web language. It
net’s semantic links. has undergone nine years of development, re-
view by a community of hundreds of people, and
3 Wordnets application in expert reasoning and linguistics.
SUMO has been subjected to formal verification
Since Princeton's WordNet (PWN) is well-
with an automated theorem prover. SUMO has
known, it may be sufficient simply to refer the
been extended with a number of domain ontolo-
reader to (Fellbaum, 1998). For the purposes of
gies, which are also public, that together number
this paper, it bears mentioning that there are sev-
some 20,000 terms and 70,000 axioms. SUMO
eral features of WordNet that make it an ideal
has been mapped by hand to the WN lexicon of
model for our work with FilWordNet, and an im-
over 115,000 noun, verb, adjective and adverb
portant product to link to.
senses, which not only acts as a check on cover-
• PWN is a mature product, having been started age and completeness, but also provides a basis
over two decades ago (Miller, 1985) for application to natural language understanding
• It is very comprehensive, with over 115,000 tasks. SUMO covers areas of knowledge such as
word senses, making it the largest wordnet temporal and spatial representation, units and
in existence measures, processes, events, actions, and obliga-
• It has been free since the project's inception tions. Domain specific ontologies extend and re-
• It is richly interconnected as a semantic net- use SUMO in the areas of finance and invest-
work ment, country almanac information, terrain mod-
• Many other languages have linked their word- eling, distributed computing, endangered lan-
net projects to it manually guages description, biological viruses, engineer-
ing devices, weather and a number of military
4 Suggested Upper Merged Ontology applications. It is important to note that each of
these ontologies employs rules. These formal
The FilWordNet project will provide a deep descriptions make explicit the meaning of each
semantic underpinning for each psycholinguistic of the terms in the ontology, unlike a simple tax-
concept. We take the same approach that was onomy, or controlled keyword list. SUMO is the
previously used in mapping all of PWN to a for- only formal ontology that has been mapped to all
mal ontology (Niles & Pease, 2003), the Sug- of WN, and the only formal upper ontology that
gested Upper Merged Ontology (Niles & Pease, has been extended with a number of domain on-
2001), as well as more recently using SUMO as tologies that are also open source. SUMO has
the formal underpinning for Arabic WordNet natural language generation templates and a mul-
(Elkateb et al 2007) ti-lingual lexicon that allows statements in
Synsets map to a general SUMO term or a SUMO-KIF and SUMO to be expressed in multi-
term that is directly equivalent to the given ple natural languages. These include English,
synset (Figure 1). New formal terms will be de- German, Arabic, Czech, Italian, Hindi (Western
fined to cover a greater number of equivalence character set) and Chinese (traditional characters
mappings, and the definitions of the new terms and pinyin).
will in turn depend upon existing fundamental
concepts in SUMO. The process of formalizing The ontology as a structured ILI
definitions will generate feedback as to whether The comprehensive mapping and definition of
word senses in WN need to be divided or com- synsets in FilWordNet to SUMO concepts rein-
bined and how the glosses may be clarified. forces a new perspective on the role of an Inter-
Since many wordnets in other languages are al- lingual Index (ILI) in connecting wordnets
ready linked by synset number, this work will (Vossen, 2004, Vossen et al 1999, Vossen 1998).
benefit wordnets in other languages as well.
In the FilWordNet project, we want to take struction. Considering the semantic links be-
this idea a step further, as was done with Arabic. tween different synsets helps the lexicographer to
If both FilWordNet and English WN synsets are determine whether the definition and synset
exhaustively defined in terms of SUMO con- grouping is valid. For example, a critical test is
cepts, SUMO can in effect become the ILI for to look amongst sibling synsets and consider
wordnets. This means that SUMO not only maps whether the definition of a given synset fully dis-
word meanings and synonyms across languages tinguishes it from its siblings.
but also provides a formal semantic framework Initially, we had the students create their trans-
for all these languages. lations simply in spreadsheets tracking the link to
The development of FilWordNet will include English via each synsets WordNet 3.0 synset
a transition phase where FilWordNet synsets are number. We have installed DebVisDic (Horak et
both linked to the English WN serving as an ILI al, 2006) and will be migrating to that tool as our
and exhaustively defined with SUMO. construction environment shortly. We expect
that this will help considerably especially with
5 Project Description respect to group coordination.
We plan an open source release of FilWordNet
FilWordNet began an introductory set of lectures
for early in 2010, once we are close to covering
to students and faculty at De La Salle University,
the base concepts.
Manila, on wordnets, linguistics semantics and
formal semantics. Six students volunteered to be 5.1 Dictionaries
the actual creators of the synsets with an inten-
sive two-week process to complete the project. To facilitate the continued manual develop-
The objective was to create 40 synsets a day per ment of the Filipino wordnet, we identified four
person with each student present for roughly online dictionaries:
three hours a day. We were able to achieve an
initial set of 1,000 synsets, although full comple- 1. http://www.tagalog-dictionary.com/in-
tion took a few weeks longer than anticipated dex.htm
due to external unrelated events. The students 2. http://www.katig.com/tagalog.html
are expected to continue work in order in a few 3. http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Tagalog/Di
months to cover the approximately 4,600 base ctionary/reverse_lookup.htm
concepts (Pease et al, 2008). Additionally, a 4. http://www.gabbydictionary.com/home
small cash prize was announced for the creators .asp
of the most synsets in hopes of creating a mature
wordnet of greater than 10,000 synsets at the end The Tagalog English Dictionary provides more
of the academic year 2009-2010. than 1000 general terms and phrases in Taga-
We created an initial seed list of Princeton’s log or Filipino and corresponding meanings.
English WordNet synsets for students to get Katig.com also offers a listing of word transla-
started. This consisted of some synsets chosen tions from English to Filipino and vice versa.
from intuition as being semantically distant from Tagalog at NIU not only offers an online
one another. Each student was expected to trans- repository of words but also tools for learning
late synset word names and definitions into Fil- the language. Gabby's Dictionary translates
ipino. They were assisted in this task by the use English words into a broad list of Filipino
of Calderon’s Tagalog-English-Spanish dictio- equivalents.
nary (Calderon, 1915). After some collaborative In addition to these online repositories, we
work on this initial set, they expanded their set to
also identified offline dictionary application
hypernyms and hyponyms of the seed word and
suchs as that of IsaWika English-Filipino
continued in this fashion.
Translator (Roxas & Borra, 2000) which offers
We have used Princeton WordNet semantic
links and assumed them to be correct in Filipino roughly 10,000 English entries with roughly
subject to manual verification later on. Similar- 20,000 Filipino equivalents. We also utilized
ly, we reuse the links from Princeton WordNet to dictionary hardcopies such as the University of
SUMO also subject to later manual verification the Philippines Diskyonaryong Filipino (UP
as to whether it is also valid for Filipino. Filipino Dictionary). This monolingual dictio-
We treat the links to SUMO and semantic nary (Almario, 2001) was used to facilitate
links within wordnet to be an important part of creating and defining synsets.
the quality assurance process for wordnet con-
5.2 Corpora 6. Emotional State
7. Combustion
We identified two major corpora that with the
8. Substance
help of a concordancer can also aid in synset cre-
9. Substance
ation. Palito corpus (Dita et al 2009), and the one
million word corpus collected by Curtis McFar-
Using a bilingual English-Filipino dictionary,
land from Filipino mini-novels (McFarland,
the different senses of the translation of "fire" to
1989).
Filipino are derived. For instance, from Gabby’s
5.3 Development Process dictionary, the following are derived: apoy,
apuyan; sunog; tupok; alab, init; silakbo;
To illustrate the development process as it has sigasig, pagpupursigi; kislap, kilatis (ng mama-
progressed beyond the initial 1000 synsets, con- haling bato); galing, husay; paghihirap, tormen-
sider the English word “fire”. The PWN synsets to, impiyerno, pagdurusa; pagpapaputok
for the word are considered together with the From Katig dictionary, the following are de-
corresponding definitions and parts of speech. rived: apoy; sunog
For the noun part of speech, there are nine senses If the word apoy is chosen, then the corre-
identified. The lexicographer selects from the list sponding definitions can be derived from some
the synset to be translated to Filipino. monolingual Filipino dictionaries where a defini-
1. fire, firing - the act of firing weapons or tion can be chosen by the lexicographer.
artillery at an enemy A decision on the most appropriate definition
2. fire - a fireplace in which a relatively can be made using the co-occurrence information
small fire is burning of the Filipino word in the Filipino corpora using
3. attack, blast, fire, flack, flak - intense a concordancer. Figure 2 shows the sentences
adverse criticism found in the Tagalog Literary Corpus from Palito
4. fire - the event of something burning having the word apoy:
5. fire - a severe trial This process is quite straightforward when the
6. ardor, ardour, fervency, fervidness, fer- original word and the translated word are both
vor, fervour, fire - feelings of great nouns. When the translated word is inflected and
warmth and intensity becomes an adjective or a verb, the definition of
7. fire, flame, flaming - the process of com- the Filipino WordNet synset is more complex.
bustion of inflammable materials pro- Morphological information is necessary to derive
ducing heat and light and (often) smoke its meaning and sense. For example:
8. fire - fuel that is burning and is used as a
means for cooking Nag-aapoy sa lagnat
9. fire - once thought to be one of four ele- (literally, very high fever)
ments composing the universe (Empedo- Nag-aapoy sa galit
cles) (literally, raging anger) or can be expressed as
galit na galit
From those synsets, there are existing map-
pings to SUMO that can be considered by the While the first example still refers to literally
lexicographer in determining the correct transla- high in temperature or physical heat, the second
tion. They are, respectively one refers to an emotional state. To settle this,
1. Shooting the concordancer will assist in finding the most
2. Fireplace appropriate meaning in context as the word or
3. Stating phrase appears in the corpora and how it co-oc-
4. Fire curs with other words in various sentences.
5. SubjectiveAssessmentAttribute

mitsa ang gasera kapag mahina na ang apoy nito. Pero kahit wala kaming ilaw na
naramdaman sa anumang siga o liyab ng apoy . Nag-usap ang aming mga labi at nagya
i ng init sa kanyang mukhang sanhi ng apoy na puso nitong nagliliyab. May trabah
mang ay nasa tabi ko nagpapanatili ng apoy nito. Nabigla ako nang aking malamang
na kung araw ay usok at kung gabi ay apoy . Isang araw ay may dumating na isang

Figure 2: Palito concordancer results for apoy


For affixed word forms of the query word, a Calderón, S., (1915) Diccionario Ingles-Español-
morphological analyzer can be used with the Tagalog, Con partes de la oracion y pronunciacion
concordancer so that these words can be pro- figurada. Primera Edición, Manila, Libreria y Pa-
cessed. In this example, the words: umaapoy, peleria de J. Martinez, Plaza P. Moraga 34/36,
Plaza Calderón 108 y Real 153/155, Intramuros.
nag-aapoy, aapuyan, inaapuyan and others will
See also http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/20738
be searched by the concordancer.
The construction Filipino WordNet synsets Dita, S., R. Roxas and P. Inventado. (2009). Building
that are not defined in existing wordnets, will re- Online Corpora of Philippine Languages. 23rd Pa-
quire a monolingual Filipino dictionary look up cific Asia Conference on Language, Information
to explore on meanings and definitions. Similar- and Computation (PACLIC-23), December 3-5,
2009, Hong Kong.. See also
ly, co-occurrence information on these words can
http://ccs.dlsu.edu.ph:8086/Palito/
be derived from context using existing Filipino
corpora, and thus, refine the derived meaning of Elkateb, S., Black, W., Rodriguez, H, Alkhalifa, M.,
these synsets. Vossen, P., Pease, A. and Fellbaum, C., (2006).
Building a WordNet for Arabic, in Proceedings of
6 Conclusions and Future Work The fifth international conference on Language Re-
sources and Evaluation (LREC 2006).
FilWordNet is an enabling resource for computa- Fellbaum, C., (1998, ed.) WordNet: An Electronic
tional linguistics on Filipino. We are currently Lexical Database. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
conducting linguistics research on the evolution
of Tagalog grammar among metropolitan resi- Horak, A., Pala, K., Rambousek, A., and Povolny, M.
(2006) DEBVisDic - First Version of New Client-
dents of the Philippines in which we plan to use
Server Wordnet Browsing and Editing Tool. In
FilWordNet in performing manual markup of Proceedings of the Third International WordNet
Filipino corpora. FilWordNet will be a basis for Conference - GWC 2006. Brno, Czech Republic:
a stemmer/lemmatizer that will use FilWordNet Masaryk University, pp. 325-328. ISBN 80-210-
to prevent overly “greedy” removal of affixes 3915-9.
from words. FilWordNet will also provide a ba-
McFarland, Curtis D., (1989) A Frequency Count of
sis for work in developing a named entity recog- Filipino. Linguistic Society of the Philippines.
nition system. With a series of projects that all Manila
leverage the work on FilWordNet, we hope that
will create motivation to continue expanding and Miller, G., (1985) “WordNet: a dictionary browser.”
improving this product. Additionally, we hope In Proceedings of the First International Confer-
ence on Information in Data, University of Water-
to involve other universities in the Philippines in
loo, Waterloo.
this effort to improve linguistic resources for the
national language. Morato, J., Marzal, M.A., Llorens, J., & Moreiro, J
(2004). WordNet Applications. In Proceedings of
Acknowledgments the Second Global WordNet Conference (GWC-
2004). Brno, Czech Republic.
We would like to thank our students, Alvin Gar- Niles, I., and Pease, A., (2003). Linking Lexicons and
cia, Hun Ping Yu, Bryan Lacaden, Jeremy Bon- Ontologies: Mapping WordNet to the Suggested
doc, Darren So and Jhovee Yap who have creat- Upper Merged Ontology, Proceedings of the IEEE
ed the actual synsets. We are grateful for their International Conference on Information and
efforts. We acknowledge De La Salle Universi- Knowledge Engineering, pp 412-416.
ty, Manila for hosting Adam Pease as a visiting Niles, I., and Pease, A. (2001). Towards a Standard
scholar, and the Philippine Council for Advanced Upper Ontology. In: Proceedings of FOIS 2001,
Science and Technology Research and Develop- Ogunquit, Maine, pp. 2-9. See also http://www.on-
ment (PCASTRD) of the Department of Science tologyportal.org
and Technology (Philippines) and Commission Pease, A., (2000). Standard Upper Ontology Knowl-
on Higher Education (Philippines) for partial edge Interchange Format. Web document
funding of his visit. http://suo.ieee.org/suo-kif.html. This is largely a
condensed version of the language described in
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