An LMF-based web Service for Accessing WordNet-type Semantic Lexicons

This paper describes a Web service for accessing WordNet-type semantic lexicons. The central idea behind the service design is: given a query, the primary functionality of lexicon access is to present a partial lexicon by extracting the relevant part of the target lexicon. Based on this idea, we implemented the system as a RESTful Web service whose input query is specified by the access URI and whose output is presented in a standardized XML data format. LMF, an ISO standard for modeling lexicons, plays the most prominent role: the access URI pattern basically reflects the lexicon structure as defined by LMF; the access results are rendered based on Wordnet-LMF, which is a version of LMF XML-serialization. The Web service currently provides accesses to Princeton WordNet, Japanese WordNet, as well as the EDR Electronic Dictionary as a trial. To accommodate the EDR dictionary within the same framework, we modeled it also as a WordNet-type semantic lexicon. This paper thus argues possible alternatives to model innately bilingual/multilingual lexicons like EDR with LMF, and proposes possible revisions to Wordnet-LMF.