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.
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