The Report of the Lecture by Prof. Dr. Petya Osenova (Sofia University, Bulgaria)

The Faculty of Linguistics with the International Office for Scientific Cooperation at the Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies (IHCS) held a summit on Sep. 19, 2023,

In this lecture, Prof. Dr. Petya Osenova, professor of Linguistics at St. Kl. Ohridski University and the senior researcher of AI and Language Technologies at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria, presented her talk on developing Word Net for Bulgarian language and shared her experience about the status and the challenges. She explained Word Net as a relational lexical resource whose basic entries are sets of synonyms (synsets) which represent a common concept meaning. Among the synsets various relations are incorporated such as is-a, part-of, derived-from, etc.

Prof Osenova added: like most Word Nets, "BTB-Word Net" started with translations of the Princeton Word Net form English into Bulgarian. However, it was translated only the set of base concepts. After this step, it continued with corpus-driven approaches to be language specific. Now Bulgarian Word Net has more than 33000 synsets and is linked to the "Open English Word Net" which is the publicly available "Princeton Word Net".

She outlined the history of Bulgarian Word Net development. Then, the main approaches that were applied in the Word Net construction were discussed. She also talked about the software that was used in creating the Word Net, validating it as well as checking the errors and editing. Last but not least, she presented several applications induced by BTB-Word Net, namely the integrated view of All about Words and the Meaning Game.