<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="W97-0804">
  <Title>Formal redundancy and consistency checking rules for the lexical database WordNet TM 1.5</Title>
  <Section position="8" start_page="30" end_page="30" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
6 Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> To our knowledge, the WordNet lexicographers were not supported by dynamic checking on update, or by an easy-to-use database query language for batch-checking, nor by a graphical browser/editor for visual feedback.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> WordNet's database set-up program, the &amp;quot;grinder&amp;quot;, obviously controls consistency, however we are not informed about this. According to TerminologyFramework's error report on download, the &amp;quot;grinder&amp;quot; did not faultlessly perform range-checking because it allowed a few semantic (synset-to-synset) pointers where they should be lexical ones (synset-element to synsetelement), and in very few cases it missed that a synset-element should not be an antonym of itself (irreflexivity of antonymy), and that a synset should not be a hyponym of itself (irreflexivity, as an entailment of aeyelycity of the generic relation). Beyond these few slips we found more interesting examples of errors or of redundancies which were not detected by chance, but by triggers (created by TerminologyFramework from the specification of the operational semantics of the relations) or mostly by queries to the database, guided by our methodological interest.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> A practical lesson is that the design of dictionary relations should be such that they are tractable by formal checking, and this is severely impeded if different relations are merged of which one has the checkable prop-erty p and another lacks it; the merged relation has then lost the checkable property p. Examples from WordNet 1.5 are meronymy (which is treated in this paper only by a short note) and antonymy. Another point we had to struggle with was WordNet's treatment of disjunctive hypernyms, especially when they are lexical gaps. The topic of implicit logical junctors in value sets of WordNet's generic and meronymic relations was also treated by Bloksma et al., but the therapy they propose we could not get to like.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> This paper does not contain a complete list of checking rules for WordNet 1.5: Whenever we tried to evaluate a rule we got hints for another rule, and we have not yet taken into account all WordNet relations and attributes. Of course, there are important and less important relations, but note, if one takes only the important ones, or the most important relation, the generic relation, then formal checking in this type of semantic net is very limited. In any case, formal checking is only a kind of syntax checking, the next step after spelling checking, but 100 new pennies will make up an Euro. Some of our concrete diagnoses may be wrong, or fall short, or become obsolete by a new release, but the questions to be posed for this type of semantic net remain.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>