IWNLP: Inverse Wiktionary for Natural Language Processing

Nowadays, there are a lot of natural lan-guage processing pipelines that are based on training data created by a few experts. This paper examines how the prolifera-tion of the internet and its collaborative application possibilities can be practically used for NLP. For that purpose, we ex-amine how the German version of Wik-tionary can be used for a lemmatization task. We introduce IWNLP, an open-source parser for Wiktionary, that reim-plements several MediaWiki markup lan-guage templates for conjugated verbs and declined adjectives. The lemmatization task is evaluated on three German corpora on which we compare our results with ex-isting software for lemmatization. With Wiktionary as a resource, we obtain a high accuracy for the lemmatization of nouns and can even improve on the results of existing software for the lemmatization of nouns. 1