Tag Archives: Wiktionary

Extracting translation data from the Wiktionary project

Wiktionary is a project for creating a multilingual, web-based free dictionary of all words in all languages. Like its sister project Wikipedia, since its inception it has been subject to criticism both in terms of its lexicographic approaches and in terms of reliability, content, procedures, and community operation (see Lepore 2006, Fuertes-Olivera 2009, Meyer 2012). Faults have also been pointed in terms of its structure which is confusing for newcomers, with parallel and unaligned information shared among the various language dictionaries, and differences in accuracy and depth among languages. Notwithstanding, data from Wiktionary is routinely employed with successful results in natural language processing and, occasionally, in linguistic research (see Otte 2011, Schlippe 2012, Medero 2009, Li 2012), as it constitutes, by far, the largest free multilingual lexical source.

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