Enhancing the Collaborative Interlingual Index for Digital Humanities: Cross-linguistic Analysis in the Domain of Theology

Abstract

We aim to support digital humanities work related to the study of sacred texts. To do this, we propose to build a cross-lingual wordnet within the domain of theology. We target the Collaborative Interlingual Index (CILI) directly instead of each individual word-net. The paper presents background for this proposal: (1) an overview of concepts relevant to theology and (2) a summary of the domain-associated is sues observed in the Princeton WordNet (PWN). We have found that definitions for concepts in this domain can be too restrictive, inconsistent, and unclear. Necessary synsets are missing. with the PWN being skewed towards Christianity. We argue that tackling problems in a single domain is a better method for improving CILI. By focusing on a single topic rather than a single language, this will result in the proper construction of definitions, romanization/translation of lemmas. and also improvements in use of/creation of a cross-lingual domain hierarchy.