Derivational relations in English, Czech and Zulu wordnets

Abstract

This article investigates one kind of cross-part-of-speech relation for English, Czech and Zulu lexical resources in the form of semantic networks (wordnets). Many languages have rules whereby new words are derived regularly and productively from existing words via morphological processes. The morphologically unmarked base words and the derived words, which share a semantic core with the base words, can be interlinked and integrated into wordnets, where they typically form “derivational nests”, or subnets. Efforts are described to capture the morphological and semantic regularities of derivational processes in English, Czech and Zulu to compare the linguistic mechanisms and to exploit them for suitable computational processing and wordnet construction. While some work has been done for English and Czech already, wordnets for Zulu and other Bantu languages are still in their infancy. This article illustrates how Zulu can benefit from existing work.