Revising the WORDNET DOMAINS Hierarchy: semantics, coverage and balancing

The continuous expansion of the multilingual information society has led in recent years to a pressing demand for multilingual linguistic resources suitable to be used for different applications. In this paper we present the WordNet Domains Hierarchy (WDH), a language-independent resource composed of 164, hierarchically organized, domain labels (e.g. Architecture, Sport, Medicine). Although WDH has been successfully applied to various Natural Language Processing tasks, the first available version presented some problems, mostly related to the lack of a clear semantics of the domain labels. Other correlated issues were the coverage and the balancing of the domains. We illustrate a new version of WDH addressing these problems by an explicit and systematic reference to the Dewey Decimal Classification. The new version of WDH has a better defined semantics and is applicable to a wider range of tasks