Researchers at the Indian Statistical Institute have developed a lexical database for Bengali called WordNet. I have posted before about WordNet based at Princeton University in the United States.

Here is what the Indradhanush WordNet Consortium say about their project:

“It is different from a conventional Bengali dictionary in the sense that while a conventional dictionary provides all round information of a lexical item used in a language, this lexical database provides mostly semantic and meaning related information for general conceptualization, machine learning and knowledge representation. It is a combination of a dictionary, a thesaurus and much more. It provides information about a word from different perspectives also giving the relationships between words.

A user can search for a Bengali word and get its meaning. In addition it gives the grammatical category namely noun, verb, adjective or adverb for the word being searched. A word may appear in more than one grammatical categories and in a grammatical category can have multiple senses. These categories and all senses are reported for the word being searched.”

Apart from the category for each sense the following information for a Bengali word is presented in the Bengali WordNet, which can be found here:

• meaning of the word
• example of the word usage
• synonyms (words with similar meanings)
• part-of-speech
• ontological details (hierarchical semantic representation)
• semantic and lexical relations

Any feedback from readers about this resource would be much appreciated.

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Credit: Hat tip to Charles Tiayon for bringing this resource to my attention.