Wiktionary

Wiktionary

Screenshot of wiktionary.org home page
Web address	www.wiktionary.org
Slogan	The Free Dictionary
Commercial	No
Type of site	Online dictionary
Registration	Optional
Available in	Multi-lingual (over 170)
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation
Created by	Jimmy Wales and the Wikimedia community
Launched	December 12, 2002
Alexa rank	828 (January 2016)[1]
Current status	active

Wiktionary (whose name is a blend of the words wiki and dictionary) is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary of all words in all languages. It is available in 172 languages and in Simple English. Like its sister project Wikipedia, Wiktionary is run by the Wikimedia Foundation, and is written collaboratively by volunteers, dubbed "Wiktionarians". Its wiki software, MediaWiki, allows almost anyone with access to the website to create and edit entries.

Because Wiktionary is not limited by print space considerations, most of Wiktionary's language editions provide definitions and translations of words from many languages, and some editions offer additional information typically found in thesauri and lexicons. The English Wiktionary includes a Wikisaurus (thesaurus) of synonyms of various words.

Wiktionary data are frequently used in various natural language processing tasks.

History and development

Wiktionary was brought online on December 12, 2002,^{[lower-alpha 1]} following a proposal by Daniel Alston and an idea by Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia.^{[lower-alpha 2]} On March 28, 2004, the first non-English Wiktionaries were initiated in French and Polish. Wiktionaries in numerous other languages have since been started. Wiktionary was hosted on a temporary domain name (wiktionary.wikipedia.org) until May 1, 2004, when it switched to the current domain name.^{[lower-alpha 3]} As of May 2009, Wiktionary features well over 5 million entries across its 272 language editions. By August 2015, the total entry count was over 15 million.^[2] The largest of the language editions is the English Wiktionary, with over 4.7 million entries, followed by the Malagasy Wiktionary with over 3.9 million entries and the French Wiktionary with over 2.9 million. Thirty six Wiktionary language editions now contain over 100,000 entries each.^{[lower-alpha 4]}

The use of bots to generate large numbers of articles is visible as "growth spurts" in this graph of article counts at the largest eight Wiktionary editions. (Data as of December 2009)

Most of the entries and many of the definitions at the project's largest language editions were created by bots that found creative ways to generate entries or (rarely) automatically imported thousands of entries from previously published dictionaries. Seven of the 18 bots registered at the English Wiktionary^{[lower-alpha 5]} created 163,000 of the entries there.^[3]

Another of these bots, "ThirdPersBot," was responsible for the addition of a number of third-person conjugations that would not have received their own entries in standard dictionaries; for instance, it defined "smoulders" as the "third-person singular simple present form of smoulder." Of the 648,970 definitions the English Wiktionary provides for 501,171 English words, 217,850 are "form of" definitions of this kind.^[4] This means its coverage of English is slightly smaller than that of major monolingual print dictionaries. The Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, has 615,000 headwords, while Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged has 475,000 entries (with many additional embedded headwords). Detailed statistics exist to show how many entries of various kinds exist.

The English Wiktionary does not rely on bots to the extent that some other editions do. The French and Vietnamese Wiktionaries, for example, imported large sections of the Free Vietnamese Dictionary Project (FVDP), which provides free content bilingual dictionaries to and from Vietnamese.^{[lower-alpha 6]} These imported entries make up virtually all of the Vietnamese edition's contents. Almost all non-Malagasy-language entries of the Malagasy Wiktionary were copied by bot from other Wiktionaries. Like the English edition, the French Wiktionary has imported the approximately 20,000 entries from the Unihan database of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters. The French Wiktionary grew rapidly in 2006 thanks in large part to bots copying many entries from old, freely licensed dictionaries, such as the eighth edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française (1935, around 35,000 words), and using bots to add words from other Wiktionary editions with French translations. The Russian edition grew by nearly 80,000 entries as "LXbot" added boilerplate entries (with headings, but without definitions) for words in English and German.^[5]

Logos

Wiktionary has historically lacked a uniform logo across its numerous language editions. Some editions use logos that depict a dictionary entry about the term "Wiktionary", based on the English Wiktionary logo, which was designed by Brion Vibber, a MediaWiki developer.^{[lower-alpha 7]} Because a purely textual logo must vary considerably from language to language, a four-phase contest to adopt a uniform logo was held at the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki from September to October 2006.^{[lower-alpha 8]} Some communities adopted the winning entry by "Smurrayinchester", a 3×3 grid of wooden tiles, each bearing a character from a different writing system. However, the poll did not see as much participation from the Wiktionary community as some community members had hoped, and a number of the larger wikis ultimately kept their textual logos.^{[lower-alpha 8]}

In April 2009, the issue was resurrected with a new contest. This time, a depiction by "AAEngelman" of an open hardbound dictionary won a head-to-head vote against the 2006 logo, but the process to refine and adopt the new logo then stalled.^{[lower-alpha 9]} In the following years, some wikis replaced their textual logos with one of the two newer logos. In 2012, 55 wikis that had been using the English Wiktionary logo received localized versions of the 2006 design by "Smurrayinchester".^{[lower-alpha 10]} As of 25 January 2013, 136 wikis, representing 51% of Wiktionary's entries, use the 2006 design by "Smurrayinchester", 31 wikis (48%) use a textual logo, and three wikis (2%) use the 2009 design by "AAEngelman".^{[lower-alpha 11]}

Accuracy

To ensure accuracy, the English Wiktionary has a policy requiring that terms be attested.^[6] Terms in major languages such as English and Chinese must be verified by:

1. clearly widespread use, or
2. use in permanently recorded media, conveying meaning, in at least three independent instances spanning at least a year.

For smaller languages such as Creek and extinct languages such as Latin, one use in a permanently recorded medium or one mention in a reference work is sufficient verification.

Critical reception

Critical reception of Wiktionary has been mixed. In 2006 Jill Lepore wrote in the article "Noah's Ark" for The New Yorker,^{[lower-alpha 12]}

There's no show of hands at Wiktionary. There's not even an editorial staff. "Be your own lexicographer!", might be Wiktionary's motto. Who needs experts? Why pay good money for a dictionary written by lexicographers when we could cobble one together ourselves?

Wiktionary isn't so much republican or democratic as Maoist. And it's only as good as the copyright-expired books from which it pilfers.

Keir Graff's review for Booklist was less critical:

Is there a place for Wiktionary? Undoubtedly. The industry and enthusiasm of its many creators are proof that there's a market. And it's wonderful to have another strong source to use when searching the odd terms that pop up in today's fast-changing world and the online environment. But as with so many Web sources (including this column), it's best used by sophisticated users in conjunction with more reputable sources.

References in other publications are fleeting and part of larger discussions of Wikipedia, not progressing beyond a definition, although David Brooks in The Nashua Telegraph described it as wild and woolly.^{[lower-alpha 13]} One of the impediments to independent coverage of Wiktionary is the continuing confusion that it is merely an extension of Wikipedia.^{[lower-alpha 14]} In 2005, PC Magazine rated Wiktionary as one of the Internet's "Top 101 Web Sites",^[8] although little information was given about the site.

The measure of correctness of the inflections for a subset of the Polish words in the English Wiktionary showed that this grammatical data is very stable. Only 131 out of 4748 Polish words have had their inflection data corrected.^[9]

Wiktionary data in natural language processing

Wiktionary has semi-structured data.^[10] Wiktionary lexicographic data should be converted to machine-readable format in order to be used in natural language processing tasks.^[11][12][13]

Wiktionary data mining is a complex task. There are the following difficulties:^[14] (1) the constant and frequent changes to data and schemata, (2) the heterogeneity in Wiktionary language edition schemata ^{[lower-alpha 15]} and (3) the human-centric nature of a wiki.

There are several parsers for different Wiktionary language editions:^[15]

• DBpedia Wiktionary:^[16] a subproject of DBpedia, the data are extracted from English, French, German and Russian wiktionaries; the data includes language, part of speech, definitions, semantic relations and translations. The declarative description of the page schema,^[17] regular expressions^[18] and finite state transducer^[19] are used in order to extract information.
• JWKTL (Java Wiktionary Library):^[20] provides access to English Wiktionary and German Wiktionary dumps via a Java Wiktionary API.^[21] The data includes language, part of speech, definitions, quotations, semantic relations, etymologies and translations. JWKTL is available for non-commercial use.
• wikokit:^[22] the parser of English Wiktionary and Russian Wiktionary.^[23] The parsed data includes language, part of speech, definitions, quotations,^{[24][lower-alpha 16]} semantic relations^[25] and translations. This is a multi-licensed open-source software.
• Etymological entries have been parsed in the Etymological WordNet project.^[26]

The various natural language processing tasks were solved with the help of Wiktionary data:^[27]

• Rule-based machine translation between Dutch language and Afrikaans; data of English Wiktionary, Dutch Wiktionary and Wikipedia were used with the Apertium machine translation platform.^[28]
• Construction of machine-readable dictionary by the parser NULEX, which integrates open linguistic resources: English Wiktionary, WordNet, and VerbNet.^[29] The parser NULEX scrapes English Wiktionary for tense information (verbs), plural form and part of speech (nouns).
• Speech recognition and synthesis, where Wiktionary was used to automatically create pronunciation dictionaries.^[30] Word-pronunciation pairs were retrieved from 6 Wiktionary language editions (Czech, English, French, Spanish, Polish, and German). Pronunciations are in terms of the International Phonetic Alphabet.^{[lower-alpha 17]} The ASR system based on English Wiktionary has the highest word error rate, where each third phoneme has to be changed.^[32]
• Ontology engineering^[33] and semantic network constructing.^{[lower-alpha 18]}
• Ontology matching.^[34]
• Text simplification. Medero & Ostendorf^[35] assessed vocabulary difficulty (reading level detection) with the help of Wiktionary data. Properties of words extracted from Wiktionary entries (definition length and POS, sense, and translation counts) were investigated. Medero & Ostendorf expected that (1) very common words will be more likely to have multiple parts of speech, (2) common words to be more likely to have multiple senses, (3) common words will be more likely to have been translated into multiple languages. These features extracted from Wiktionary entries were useful in distinguishing word types that appear in Simple English Wikipedia articles from words that only appear in the Standard English comparable articles.
• Part-of-speech tagging. Li et al. (2012)^[36] built multilingual POS-taggers for eight resource-poor languages on the basis of English Wiktionary and Hidden Markov Models.^{[lower-alpha 19]}
• Sentiment analysis.^[37]

Notes

1. Wikipedia mailing list archive discussion announcing the opening of the Wiktionary project – Retrieved May 3, 2011
2. Wikipedia mailing list archive discussion from Larry Sanger giving the idea on Wiktionary – Retrieved May 3, 2011
3. Wiktionary's current URL is www.wiktionary.org.
4. Wiktionary total article counts are here. Detailed statistics by word type are available here .
5. The user list at the English Wiktionary identifies accounts that have been given "bot status".
6. Hồ Ngọc Đức, Free Vietnamese Dictionary Project. Details at the Vietnamese Wiktionary.
7. "Wiktionary talk:Wiktionary Logo", English Wiktionary, Wikimedia Foundation.
8. "Wiktionary/logo", Meta-Wiki, Wikimedia Foundation.
9. "Wiktionary/logo/refresh/voting", Meta-Wiki, Wikimedia Foundation.
10. [Translators-l] 56 Wiktionaries got a localised logo
11. m:Wiktionary/logo#Logo use statistics.
12. The full article is not available on-line.^[7]
13. David Brooks, "Online, interactive encyclopedia not just for geeks anymore, because everyone seems to need it now, more than ever!" The Nashua Telegraph (August 4, 2004)
14. In this citation, the author refers to Wiktionary as part of the Wikipedia site: Adapted from an article by Naomi DeTullio (2006 (1st Quarter)). "Wikis for Librarians" (PDF). NETLS News #142 (Northeast Texas Library System). p. 15. Archived from the original (PDF newsletter) on 2007-06-05. Retrieved April 21, 2007. Check date values in: |date= (help)
15. E.g. compare the entry structure and formatting rules in English Wiktionary and Russian Wiktionary.
16. Quotations are extracted only from Russian Wiktionary.^[24]
17. If there are several IPA notations on a Wiktionary page – either for different languages or for pronunciation variants, then the first pronunciation was extracted.^[31]
18. http://conceptnet5.media.mit.edu
19. The source code and the results of POS-tagging are available at https://code.google.com/p/wikily-supervised-pos-tagger

References

Specific

1. "Wiktionary.org Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2016-01-09.
2. https://www.wiktionary.org/
3. TheDaveBot, TheCheatBot, Websterbot, PastBot, NanshuBot
4. Detailed statistics as of 1 July 2013
5. LXbot Archived November 11, 2012, at the Wayback Machine.
6. "Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion". Wiktionary. Retrieved 13 March 2015.
7. Lepore 2006.
8. PC Mag 2005.
9. Kurmas 2010.
10. Meyer & Gurevych 2012, p. 140.
11. Zesch, Müller & Gurevych 2008, p. 4, Figure 1.
12. Meyer & Gurevych 2010, p. 40.
13. Krizhanovsky, Transformation 2010, p. 1.
14. Hellmann & Auer 2013, p. 302, p. 16 in PDF.
15. Hellmann, Brekle & Auer 2012, p. 3, Table 1.
16. DBpedia Wiktionary
17. Hellmann, Brekle & Auer 2012, pp. 8–9.
18. Hellmann, Brekle & Auer 2012, p. 10.
19. Hellmann, Brekle & Auer 2012, p. 11.
20. JWKTL
21. Zesch, Müller & Gurevych 2008.
22. wikokit
23. Krizhanovsky, Transformation 2010.
24. Smirnov 2012.
25. Krizhanovsky, Comparison 2010.
26. Etymological WordNet
27. Krizhanovsky 2012, p. 14.
28. Otte & Tyers 2011.
29. McFate & Forbus 2011.
30. Schlippe, Ochs & Schultz 2012.
31. Schlippe, Ochs & Schultz 2012, p. 4802.
32. Schlippe, Ochs & Schultz 2012, p. 4804.
33. Meyer & Gurevych 2012.
34. Lin & Krizhanovsky 2011.
35. Medero & Ostendorf 2009.
36. Li, Graça & Taskar 2012.
37. Chesley et al. 2006.

General

• Chesley, Paula; Vincent, Bruce; Xu, Li; Srihari, Rohini K. (2006). "Using verbs and adjectives to automatically classify blog sentiment" (PDF). Training 580: 233–235. Retrieved May 9, 2013.

• Hellmann, Sebastian; Brekle, Jonas; Auer, Sören (2012). "Leveraging the Crowdsourcing of Lexical Resources for Bootstrapping a Linguistic Data Cloud" (PDF). Proc. Joint Int. Semantic Technology Conference (JIST). Nara, Japan.

• Hellmann, S.; Auer, S. (2013). "Towards Web-Scale Collaborative Knowledge Extraction" (PDF). In Gurevych, Iryna; Kim, Jungi. The People's Web Meets NLP. Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing. Springer-Verlag. pp. 287–313. ISBN 978-3-642-35084-9.

• Krizhanovsky, Andrew (2010). "Transformation of Wiktionary entry structure into tables and relations in a relational database schema". arXiv:1011.1368 [cs].
• Krizhanovsky, Andrew (2010). "The comparison of Wiktionary thesauri transformed into the machine-readable format". arXiv:1006.5040 [cs].

• Krizhanovsky, Andrew (2012). "A quantitative analysis of the English lexicon in Wiktionaries and WordNet" (PDF). International Journal of Intelligent Information Technologies (IJIIT) 8 (4): 13–22. doi:10.4018/jiit.2012100102. Retrieved May 9, 2013.

• Kurmas, Zachary (July 2010). Zawilinski: a library for studying grammar in Wiktionary. Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration. Gdansk, Poland. Retrieved 2011-07-29.

• Li, Shen; Graça, Joao V.; Taskar, Ben (2012). "Wiki-ly supervised part-of-speech tagging" (PDF). Proceedings of the 2012 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning. Jeju Island, Korea: Association for Computational Linguistics. pp. 1389–1398.

• Lepore, Jill (November 6, 2006). "Noah's Ark" (Abstract). The New Yorker. Retrieved April 21, 2007.

• Lin, Feiyu; Krizhanovsky, Andrew (2011). "Multilingual ontology matching based on Wiktionary data accessible via SPARQL endpoint". Proc. of the 13th Russian Conference on Digital Libraries RCDL'2011. Voronezh, Russia. pp. 19–26.

• McFate, Clifton J.; Forbus, Kenneth D. (2011). "NULEX: an open-license broad coverage lexicon" (PDF). The 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Proceedings of the Conference. Portland, Oregon, USA: The Association for Computer Linguistics. pp. 363–367. ISBN 978-1-932432-88-6.

• Medero, Julie; Ostendorf, Mari (2009). "Analysis of vocabulary difficulty using wiktionary" (PDF). Proc. SLaTE Workshop.

• Meyer, C. M.; Gurevych, I. (2010). "Worth its Weight in Gold or Yet Another Resource - A Comparative Study of Wiktionary, OpenThesaurus and GermaNet" (PDF). Proc. 11th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics, Iasi, Romania. pp. 38–49.

• Meyer, C. M.; Gurevych, I. (2012). "OntoWiktionary – Constructing an Ontology from the Collaborative Online Dictionary Wiktionary" (PDF). In Pazienza, M. T.; Stellato, A. Semi-Automatic Ontology Development: Processes and Resources. IGI Global. pp. 131–161. ISBN 978-1-4666-0188-8.

• Otte, Pim; Tyers, F. M. (2011). "Rapid rule-based machine translation between Dutch and Afrikaans" (PDF). In Forcada, Mikel L.; Depraetere, Heidi; Vandeghinste, Vincent. 16th Annual Conference of the European Association of Machine Translation, EAMT11. Leuven, Belgium. pp. 153–160.

• Schlippe, Tim; Ochs, Sebastian; Schultz, Tanja (2012). "Grapheme-to-phoneme model generation for Indo-European languages" (PDF). Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP). Kyoto, Japan. pp. 4801–4804.

• Smirnov A., Levashova T., Karpov A., Kipyatkova I., Ronzhin A., Krizhanovsky A., Krizhanovsky N.. Analysis of the quotation corpus of the Russian Wiktionary. Research in Computing Science. 2012 [Retrieved November 7, 2013];56:101–112.

• Zesch, Torsten; Müller, Christof; Gurevych, Iryna (2008). "Extracting Lexical Semantic Knowledge from Wikipedia and Wiktionary" (PDF). Proceedings of the Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC). Marrakech, Morocco.

• "Wiktionary". Top 101 Web Sites. PC Magazine. April 6, 2005. Retrieved December 16, 2005.

External links

• List of all Wiktionary editions
• Wiktionary front page
  • English Wiktionary
• Wiktionary Android package at the F-Droid repository
• Wiktionary on Google Play
• Wiktionary's multilingual statistics
• Wikimedia's page on Wiktionary (including list of all existing Wiktionaries)
• Pages about Wiktionary in Meta.
• Meta:Main Page – OmegaWiki