Time travel in Turkish: WordNets for modern Turkish

Abstract

Wordnets have been popular tools for providing and representing semantic and lexical relations of languages. They are useful tools for various purposes in NLP studies. Many researches created WordNets for different languages. For Turkish, there are two WordNets, namely the Turkish WordNet of BalkaNet and KeNet. In this paper, we present new WordNets for Turkish each of which is based on one of the first 9 editions of the Turkish dictionary starting from the 1944 edition. These WordNets are historical in nature and make implications for Modern Turkish. They are developed by extending KeNet, which was created based on the 2005 and 2011 editions of the Turkish dictionary. In this paper, we explain the steps in creating these 9 new WordNets for Turkish, discuss the challenges in the process and report comparative results about the WordNets.