Thinking globally, acting locally -- Progress in the African Wordnet Project

The African Wordnet Project (AWN) includes all nine indigenous South African languages, namely isiZulu, isiXhosa, Setswana, Sesotho sa Leboa, Tshivenda, Siswati, Sesotho, isiNdebele and Xitsonga. The AWN currently includes 61 000 synsets as well as definitions and usage examples for a large part of the synsets. The project recently received extended funding from the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) and aims to update all aspects of the current resource, including the seed list used for new development, software tools used and mapping the AWN to the latest version of PWN 3.1. As with any resource development project, it is essential to also include phases of focused quality assurance and updating of the basis on which the resource is built. The African languages remain under-resourced. This paper describes progress made in the development of the AWN as well as recent technical improvements.