Chih-Yao Lee

The present study proposes an innovative way of expanding the lexical repository of Chinese Wordnet (CWN). Fine-grained as the senses and sense facets of its entries are, the current status of CWN fails to include such high-frequency words as àiqíng (‘love’) and such high-familiarity words as guānxīn (‘to care’) due to the lac of linguistic manpower. In view of this limited inclusion of words on CWN, we propose to extend its lexical knowledge by constructing a wiki for CWN, or CWIKIN—a collaborative platform on which registered users can contribute to CWN by adding new entries, editing existing ones and rating one another’s contribution to ensure the quality of collective intelligence. What distinguishes CWIKIN from a typical wiki is that it presents synonymous sets of Chinese words that are currently only implicitly represented on CWN, and helps users in adding those words as well as various lexical semantic relations by suggesting potential equivalents along with their parts-of-speech, definitions and example sentences bootstrapped from Princeton WordNet via Sinica BOW, a bilingual ontological wordnet. We believe that the proposed platform will facilitate the enrichment of Chinese Lexical Resources in the context of Web collective intelligence and contribute to the advancement of Chinese Lexicography.