Uma metodologia para o desenvolvimento de Wordnets terminológicas em português do Brasil

Abstract

The development of computational systems capable of understanding and producing natural languages (e.g.: machine translation systems) requires some linguistic resources (lingwares), e.g. lexical knowledge databases. These resources are a crucial component of a wide variety of natural language processing (NLP) applications. Due to the increasing need to process specialized texts, domain-specific (or terminological) lexical databases have been built in many languages, especially in wordnet format. Despite the existence of a reasonable number of terminological wordnets in many languages, there is no clear and generic methodology to build them. For Brazilian Portuguese (BP), by the way, there is no domain-specific lexical database in the wordnet model. In this scenario, the TermiNet project has been developed. This project aims (i) to instantiate the generic NLP methodology proposed by Dias-da-Silva (2006) to develop terminological wordnets and (ii) to apply it to build a terminological wordnet in BP. In addition to the benefits to the NLP field, terminological wordnets may also contribute to the development of terminological/terminographic products as the organization of lexical-conceptual knowledge is an essential step in building such products. In this paper, we offer an introduction to the TermiNet project focusing on the instantiation of the generic NLP methodology.