Announcement: BabelNet goes live!

[apologies for cross-postings]

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RELEASE OF BABELNET LIVE (BETA)

              http://babelnet.org <http://babelnet.org/>

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We are happy to announce the release of a brand-new, live edition (beta) of
BabelNet, a project also featured in a TIME magazine article
<http://wwwusers.di.uniroma1.it/%7Enavigli/img/Redefining_the_modern_dictionary.png>
and winner of the META prize 2015 <http://www.meta-net.eu/meta-prize>. The new
live edition will be continuously updated over time from its underlying
resources and will enable dynamic update of contents (starting from April
2017). BabelNet (http://babelnet.org) is the largest multilingual
encyclopedic dictionary, semantic network and knowledge base created by
means of the seamless integration of the largest multilingual Web
encyclopedia - i.e., Wikipedia - with the most popular computational
lexicon of English - i.e., WordNet, and other lexical resources such as
Wiktionary, OmegaWiki, Wikidata, Open Multilingual WordNet, Wikiquote,
VerbNet, Microsoft Terminology, GeoNames, WoNeF, ImageNet, ItalWordNet,
FrameNet. The integration is performed via a high-performance linking
algorithm and by filling in lexical gaps with the aid of Machine
Translation. The result is an encyclopedic dictionary that provides Babel
synsets, i.e., concepts and named entities lexicalized in many languages
and connected with large amounts of semantic relations.

BabelNet live comes with the following features:


   -

   Ready for continuous updates over time from its underlying resources and
   dynamic update of contents
   -

   Increased number of *relations* from 380M to around 1.8 billion
   -

   Increased number of *images* from to 10.8M to 12.1M
   -

   Increased number of *synsets* from 13.8M to 15.2M
   -

   Increased number of *senses* from 745M to 932M
   -

   Better management and visualization of *has-part, part-of, has-kind,
   has-instance and is-a* relations
   -

   Total number of languages increased from 271 to *284*. *New languages*
   include: Adyghe, Azerbaijani, Goan Konkani, Livvinkarjala, Maithili,
   Northern Luri, Serbo-Croatian, South Patois, Tarantino, Tulu
   -

   Cantonese, Min Nan and Classical Chinese are now managed, displayed and
   searchable separately from standard Chinese
   -

   Chinese text is shown in either *traditional* or *simplified*
   *characters*, depending on which is used in user searches
   -

   *Update of all of the resources*, including:
   -

      All of the Open Multilingual Wordnets at their latest release
      -

      Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikidata and OmegaWiki
      -

   Integration of *new open wordnets* for Gaelic, Chinese, Portuguese and
   Korean
   -

   Several *bug fixes* and *minor improvements*, including improved
   management of resource licenses, removal of Wikipedia lists and Wikipedia
   disambiguation pages, etc.


BabelNet was part of the MultiJEDI project <http://multijedi.org>
originally funded by the European Research Council and headed by Prof. Roberto
Navigli <http://wwwusers.di.uniroma1.it/~navigli/> at the Linguistic
Computing Laboratory <http://lcl.uniroma1.it> of the Sapienza University of
Rome. While more related work will come from a new ERC Consolidator Grant
recently awarded to prof. Navigli, BabelNet is now a self-sustained project.
It is, and always will be, free for research purposes, including download.
Babelscape <http://babelscape.com>, a Sapienza startup company, is
BabelNet's commercial support arm, thanks to which the project will be
continued and improved over time, including the development of new projects.

Enjoy!
The BabelNet group

-- 
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Roberto Navigli
Dipartimento di Informatica
Sapienza University of Rome
Viale Regina Elena 295b (building G, second floor)
00161 Roma Italy
Phone: +39 0649255161 - Fax: +39 06 49918301
Home Page: http://wwwusers.di.uniroma1.it/~navigli
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