Completing WordNets with Sememe Knowledge

Abstract

WordNets organize words into synonymous word sets, and the connections between words present the semantic relationships between them, which have become an indispensable source for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. With the development and evolution of languages, WordNets need to be constantly updated manually. To address the problem of inadequate word semantic knowledge of “new words”, this study explores a novel method to automatically update the WordNet knowledge base by incorporating word-embedding techniques with sememe knowledge from HowNet. The model first characterizes the relationships among words and sememes with a graph structure and jointly learns the embedding vectors of words and sememes; finally, it synthesizes word similarities to predict concepts (synonym sets) of new words. To examine the performance of the proposed model, a new dataset connected to sememe knowledge and WordNet is constructed. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the existing baseline models.