Prolexbase 2.0

Prolexbase 2.0 is a multilingual relational dictionary of proper names, conceived initially at the University of Tours, France and at the University of Belgrade, Serbia, and further developed at the Polish Academy of Sciences (IPIPAN). It contains a language-independent typology of proper names with 4 supertypes and 34 types, as well as various language-independent or language-specific relations (synonymy, meronymy accessibility, variation etc.). A pivot-oriented design of concepts yields alignment of proper names in a language with their counterparts if other languages. A large majority of the data have been extracted from Wikipedia and GeoNames. All data have been manually validated.

Prolexbase creation has been supported by the following projects:

• Technolangue programme from the French Ministry of Industry (2003-2005),

• Egide Pavle-Savic programme from the Serbian Ministry of Science, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the French Ministry of Research,

• ERDF Nekst project,

• European (CIP ICT-PSP) CESAR project, part of META-NET.

Some aspects of its construction, contents and use have been described in:

• Savary, A., Manicki, L., Baron, M.: ProlexFeeder— Populating a Multilingual Ontology of Proper Names from Open Sources. Submitted to Journal of Language Modelling.

• Bouchou, B., Maurel, D. (2008): Prolexbase et LMF : vers un standard pour les ressources lexicales sur les noms propres. In Traitement Automatique des Langues, 49(1).

• Maurel, D. (2008): Prolexbase: a Multilingual Relational Lexical Database of Proper Names. In proceedings of LREC 2008, Marrakech, Morocco.

• Tran, M., Maurel, D. (2006): Prolexbase. Un dictionnaire relationnel multilingue de noms propres. In Traitement Automatique des Langues, 47(3).

• Krstev S., Vitas D., Maurel D., Tran M. (2005), Multilingual Ontology of Proper Names, Second Language & Technology Conference: Human Language Technologies as a Challenge for Computer Science and Linguistics, Poznan, Poland.

Prolexbase 2.0 of the resource contains the following interlinked data:

• 67,000 languge-independent pivots,
• 40,000 Polish proper names and their corresponding 165,000 inflected forms,
• 33,000 English proper names and their corresponding 18,000 inflected forms,
• 100,000 French proper names and their corresponding 142,000 inflected forms,
• 65,500 relations.

See also Prolexbase on CNRTL for a previous version of the French data, serialized in an LMF standard format.

Authors

• Małgorzata Baron - lexicography,

• Béatrice Bouchou Markhoff - LMF format design,

• Leszek Manicki - design and implementation of ProlexFeeder (Prolexbase population from Wikipedia),

• Denis Maurel - design and dissemination, project management,

• Agata Savary – project management,

• Mickaël Tran - database design and implementation.

Tools

• ProlexFeeder, a tool for semi-automatic population of Prolexbase from open sources, notably Wikipedia and Geonames,

• Translatica's automatic inflection tool for multi-word units.

License

All Prolexbase 2.0 data are available under the CC BY-SA license, i.e. the same as for Wikipedia and GeoNames.

Available resources

• MySQL export file (to appear),

• List of all inflected forms of Polish names together with their semantic and grammatical tags (to appear).

• XML Schema for LMF serialisation.

Future work

• Exporting Prolexbase 2.0 to LMF
• Opening a web interface for Prolexbase 2.0 navigation.

• Releasing ProlexFeeder under an open license.