Ontological Structure-Based Retrieval System for Tamil

Abstract

Ontological structure of Tamil (OST) is an outcome of an extensive research activity that went on in the field of lexical semantics of Tamil for the last three decades. Rajendran’s (Semantic structure of Tamil vocabulary. Report of the UGC sponsored postdoctoral work (in manuscript). Deccan College Post-Doctoral Research Institute, Pune, 1983) post-doctoral research work went through several stages before culminating into OST. It depicts the travel from Tamil thesaurus to Tamil WordNet and into OST. OST is a lexical resource which amalgamates all sorts of information available in a dictionary, thesaurus and WordNet. The Dravidian WordNets (in which Tamil WordNet is one of the four components) built under the Indo-WordNet project depended on an ontology developed by Western conceptualization of the world found in English. This has not taken into consideration the Indian conceptualization of the world depicted in the nikhandu tradition. There are many lexical gaps between English WordNet and Tamil WordNet. Moreover, building a WordNet based on Hindi WordNet which in turn is built on English WordNet will take many years to complete and it would miss the conceptualization depicted in Indian tradition. Apart from this, the extension approach of building Tamil WordNet using Hindi WordNet cannot fulfil Dravidian conceptualization. A merger approach of building separate WordNets and collapsing them into one would have been a preferable approach. The present OST tried to overcome the lacunae found in Tamil WordNet. OST is based on the Indian and Dravidian conceptualization and the process of building one is comparatively very simple. We have the plan to mend it into a generic one so that all the Dravidian languages can be easily accommodated into it. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.