Where Bears Have the Eyes of Currant: Towards a Mansi WordNet Csilla Horváth1, Ágoston Nagy1, Norbert Szilágyi2, Veronika Vincze3 1University of Szeged, Institute of English–American Studies Egyetem u. 2., 6720 Szeged, Hungary
[email protected],
[email protected] 2University of Szeged, Department of Finno-Ugrian Studies Egyetem u. 2., 6720 Szeged, Hungary
[email protected] 3Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Research Group on Artificial Intelligence Tisza Lajos krt. 103., 6720 Szeged, Hungary
[email protected] Abstract tasks, be it mono- or multilingual: for instance, in machine translation, information retrieval and so on. Here we report the construction of a wordnet In this paper, we aim at constructing a wordnet for Mansi, an endangered minority language for Mansi, an indigenous language spoken in Rus- spoken in Russia. We will pay special atten- sia. Mansi is an endangered minority language, with tion to challenges that we encountered during the building process, among which the most less than 1000 native speakers. Most often, minority important ones are the low number of native languages are not recognized as official languages speakers, the lack of thesauri and the bear in their respective countries, where there is an offi- language. We will discuss our solutions to cial language (in this case, Russian) and there is one these issues, which might have some theoreti- or there are several minority languages (e.g. Mansi, cal implications for the methodology of word- Nenets, Saami etc.). Hence, the speakers of minority net building in general. languages are bilingual, and usually use the official or majority language in their studies and work, and 1 Introduction the language of administration is the majority lan- guage as well.