Aligning GermaNet Senses with Wiktionary Sense Definitions

Sense definitions are a crucial component for wordnets and enhance the usability of wordnets for a wide variety of NLP applications. Many wordnets for languages other than English – including the German wordnet GermaNet – lack comprehensive coverage of such definitions. The purpose of this paper is to automatically align sense descriptions from the web-based dictionary Wiktionary to lexical units in GermaNet in order to extend GermaNet with sense descriptions. An alignment algorithm based on word overlaps is developed and different setups of the algorithm are compared. This algorithm yields as the best result an accuracy of 93.8 % and an F1-score of 84.3, which confirms the viability of the proposed method for automatically enriching GermaNet. This best result crucially involves the use of coordinated relations as a novel concept for calculating sense alignment.