LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 17:5 May 2017
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
         N. Nadaraja Pillai, Ph.D.
         Renuga Devi, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

HOME PAGE

Click Here for Back Issues of Language in India - From 2001

BOOKS FOR YOU TO READ AND DOWNLOAD FREE!

REFERENCE MATERIALS

BACK ISSUES

  • E-mail your articles and book-length reports in Microsoft Word to languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.

  • PLEASE READ THE GUIDELINES GIVEN IN HOME PAGE IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE LIST OF CONTENTS.

  • Your articles and book-length reports should be written following the APA, MLA, LSA, or IJDL Stylesheet.

  • The Editorial Board has the right to accept, reject, or suggest modifications to the articles submitted for publication, and to make suitable stylistic adjustments. High quality, academic integrity, ethics and morals are expected from the authors and discussants.

Copyright © 2016
M. S. Thirumalai

Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
11249 Oregon Circle
Bloomington, MN 55438
USA
Custom Search

Visual Onto-thesaurus for Tamil

Dr. Rajendran Sankaravelayuthan & Dr. Anandkumar, M.

Abstract

Tamil Visual Onto-thesaurus (TVOT or simply VOT) is an outcome of an extensive research activity that went on in the field of lexical semantics of Tamil. It went through several stages before being culminated into Tamil visual onto-thesaurus. It depicts our travel from Tamil thesaurus to Tamil word net. It is a lexical resource which amalgamates all sorts of information available in a dictionary, thesaurus and wordNet. The Dravidian wordNets (in which Tamil wordNet is one of the four components) built under the IndoWordNet project depended on an ontology developed by Western conceptualization of the world found in English). This has not taken into consideration the Indian conceptualization of the world depicted in the nikhandu tradition. Say for examples, nikhandus have classifications such a six types of tastes, nine types of planets (gragams), 7 types of mandalams (a type of division), 15 tidis (15 phases of moon), etc. which are crucial for Indian tradition. In the western oriented WordNet ontology there is no scope for the visualization of concepts depicted in nikhandus. Moreover building a wordNet based on Hindi wordNet which in turn is built on English wordNet will take many years to complete and it would miss the conceptualization depicted in Indian tradition. Apart from this the extension approach of building Tamil wordNet using Hindi wordNet cannot fulfill Dravidian conceptualization. A merger approach of building separate wordNets and collapsing them into one would have been a preferable approach. The present visual onto-thesaurus is based on the Indian and Dravidian conceptualization and the process of building one is comparatively very simple. We have the plan to mend it into a generic one so that all the Dravidian languages can be easily accommodated into it.

Keywords: Aristotle, Aristotelian principle, lexical semantics, thesaurus, paper thesaurus, Visual Onto-thesaurus, wordNet, Tamil wordNet, nikhandu, nikhandu tradition, Dravidian conceptualization, ontology, natural language processing, hyponymy, hyponym, homonymy, homonym, polysemy, hypernymy, hypernym, holonymy, holonym, troponymy, troponym, taxonymy, taxonym, entailment, superordinate term, lexical hierarchy, hierarchy, compatibility, incompatibility, opposition, antonym, antonymy, hierarchical classification, semantic field, semantic network, unique beginner, generative lexicon, linguistic issue, computational issue, congruence relation, lexical relation, lexical inheritance, meronymy, meronym, taxonomic hierarchy, hierarchy, meronymic hierarchy, entity, entities, events, abstracts, relationals, component, semantic component, componential analysis.

1. Introduction

A paper thesaurus for Tamil was prepared in 1990 based on the principles of componential analysis of meaning propounded by Nida (1975), Indian tradition of nikhandu and Aristotelian principle of genera and species and was published in 2001 (Rajendran, 2001), nearly after a decade. Following the paper thesaurus, an Electronic thesaurus for Tamil was attempted and a book on Tamil electronic thesaurus was published in 2006 (Rajendran and Baskaran, 2006). The preparation of wordNet for Tamil was undertaken (2001-2003) with the financial assistance from Tamil Virtual University (renamed now as Tamil virtual academy) and a crude version of it based on the ontology developed by Rajendran (Rajendran, 2001) was submitted to the institute in 2003. After that, from 2009 onwards with the fund received from MHRD and Department of electronics and information Technology of Govt. of India the building of Dravidian wordNets were executed based on Hindi wordNet; nearly 30000 synsets (concepts) have been completed. Still we have a long way to go to achieve the desired target. At present a team from CEN, Amrita University is involved in building onto-thesaurus for Tamil as a part of the project entitled “Computing Tools for Tamil Language teaching and learning”. The project is funded by Tamil Virtual Academy, Chennai.

The principles of ontology and various kinds of ontologies and ontological applications are elaborately discussed in this paper as the present VOT has taken into its fold many of the ideas discussed in them.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Dr. Rajendran Sankaravelayuthan
s_rajendran@cb.amrita.edu

Dr. Anandkumar, M.
m_anandkumar@cb.amrita.edu

Centre for Computational Engineering and Networking (CEN)
Amrita School of Engineering
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham
Amrita Universtiy
Coimbatore
Tamilnadu
India

Custom Search
  • Click Here to Go to Creative Writing Section

  • Send your articles
    as an attachment
    to your e-mail to
    languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.
  • Please ensure that your name, academic degrees, institutional affiliation and institutional address, and your e-mail address are all given in the first page of your article. Also include a declaration that your article or work submitted for publication in LANGUAGE IN INDIA is an original work by you and that you have duly acknowledged the work or works of others you used in writing your articles, etc. Remember that by maintaining academic integrity we not only do the right thing but also help the growth, development and recognition of Indian/South Asian scholarship.