Open English NameNet: Extending English Wordnet with Names

What it is about

Open English NameNet adds named entities from Wikidata to Open English WordNet (OEWN), placing each entity under the WordNet hierarchy through instance-hypernym links. The method combines WordNet-to-Wikipedia mappings with Wikidata and uses separate strategies for people, plants and animals, and languages. Each link group was checked by hand on a sample, and the acceptance rates differ a lot: 90.1% for the general linking, 87.6% for taxon names, 99.5% for binomial species names, 88.1% for taxon versus common names, and 68.4% for languages. The OEWN mappings alone are about 96.1% accurate but cover only 12,083 links. The result is described as the largest English lexical-semantic resource, and the code is open.

Ideas

• I1. en/src/ptag.rs and onto/src/wsd.rs: when a capitalised token has no OEWN sense, accept a person or species reading only when the rule is one with a high measured acceptance (binomial species names at 99.5%), and leave language names unlinked (68.4%). Measure the proper-noun WSD on EWT with and without this rule.
• I2. en/src/tok.rs: a deterministic check for binomial names (a capitalised genus followed by a lowercase species word) as a single token group for the lexicon, and a count of how often it fires on GUM test text (test only).
• I3. Acceptance as a gate: record the acceptance rate of each linking strategy in onto next to each link, so that explain can state which rule and which measured rate produced a name sense.

For Mova

The touch points are en/src/ptag.rs (the proper-noun tag), en/src/tok.rs (multiword name tokens) and onto/src/wsd.rs (sense choice). The chapter is 11. Nouns, with 07. Punctuation, capital letters, abbreviations and numbers for capitals. The NameNet data is CC BY-NC, so it may be used for tests and measurements only, never built into onto; the Wikidata-based rules are the part to re-implement. Measure first the proper-noun WSD on EWT with the species rule alone.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/4mit9o8vc2gw

@inproceedings{mccrae2026open,
  title = {{Open English NameNet: Extending English Wordnet with Names}},
  author = {McCrae, John P.},
  booktitle = {LDL 2026 (Linked Data in Linguistics, LREC 2026)},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/4mit9o8vc2gw},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/4mit9o8vc2gw}
}

References

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