Article,
Representing Natural Gender in Multilingual Databases
International Journal of Lexicography, (2005)
Abstract
Natural languages encode gender distinctions in various ways. We investigate the differences between English and Hebrew in this respect, our departure point being the relations that are defined between the feminine and the masculine realizations of nouns in the English WordNet. We define a number of distinct classes of English nouns which differ in the way they realize gender distinctions. We then define similar classes of Hebrew nouns and show how to map the Hebrew nouns (and relations defined over them) to the English structure. This establishes a systematic assignment of Hebrew nouns to WordNet synsets, which is consistent with the ideas underlying multilingual extensions of WordNet. The main result is a consistent Hebrew WordNet which is aligned with the English one, but an additional contribution is a set of desiderata for the correct encoding of (systematic) semantic differences among languages.
