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# Open English NameNet: Extending English Wordnet with Names

**Authors:** [John P. McCrae](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/john-p-mccrae/) · **Year:** 2026 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the LREC 2026 Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics (LDL 2026) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/2026.ldl-1.7](https://aclanthology.org/2026.ldl-1.7/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) (LREC proceedings) — summary only

[**0** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W7166545174) openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14[LDL 2026 (Linked Data in Linguistics, LREC 2026)](https://openalex.org/S7407088301)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.63317/4mit9o8vc2gw)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2026.ldl-1.7.pdf)
- [DOI 10.63317/4mit9o8vc2gw](https://doi.org/10.63317/4mit9o8vc2gw)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7166545174)

**Authors (1)**

1. [John P. McCrae](https://openalex.org/A5126951697) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7227-1331) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2446182900) · h 4 · 35 citations · 40 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex-snapshot (2026-10-14); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

Open English NameNet adds named entities from Wikidata to Open English WordNet (OEWN), placing each entity under the WordNet hierarchy through instance-hypernym links. The method combines WordNet-to-Wikipedia mappings with Wikidata and uses separate strategies for people, plants and animals, and languages. Each link group was checked by hand on a sample, and the acceptance rates differ a lot: 90.1% for the general linking, 87.6% for taxon names, 99.5% for binomial species names, 88.1% for taxon versus common names, and 68.4% for languages. The OEWN mappings alone are about 96.1% accurate but cover only 12,083 links. The result is described as the largest English lexical-semantic resource, and the code is open.

## Ideas

- I1. `en/src/ptag.rs` and `onto/src/wsd.rs`: when a capitalised token has no OEWN sense, accept a person or species reading only when the rule is one with a high measured acceptance (binomial species names at 99.5%), and leave language names unlinked (68.4%). Measure the proper-noun WSD on EWT with and without this rule.
- I2. `en/src/tok.rs`: a deterministic check for binomial names (a capitalised genus followed by a lowercase species word) as a single token group for the lexicon, and a count of how often it fires on GUM test text (test only).
- I3. Acceptance as a gate: record the acceptance rate of each linking strategy in `onto` next to each link, so that `explain` can state which rule and which measured rate produced a name sense.

## For Mova

The touch points are `en/src/ptag.rs` (the proper-noun tag), `en/src/tok.rs` (multiword name tokens) and `onto/src/wsd.rs` (sense choice). The chapter is [11. Nouns](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/11-nouns/), with [07. Punctuation, capital letters, abbreviations and numbers](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/07-punctuation-capitals-numbers/) for capitals. The NameNet data is CC BY-NC, so it may be used for tests and measurements only, never built into `onto`; the Wikidata-based rules are the part to re-implement. Measure first the proper-noun WSD on EWT with the species rule alone.

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.63317/4mit9o8vc2gw](https://doi.org/10.63317/4mit9o8vc2gw)

```
@inproceedings{mccrae2026open,
  title = {{Open English NameNet: Extending English Wordnet with Names}},
  author = {McCrae, John P.},
  booktitle = {LDL 2026 (Linked Data in Linguistics, LREC 2026)},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/4mit9o8vc2gw},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/4mit9o8vc2gw}
}
```

- [← previous In the LLM era, Word Sense Induction remains unsolved](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/lex-2025-mosolova-wsi-unsolved/)
- [next → English Word Sense Disambiguation in 2026: When the Labels Become the Bottleneck](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/lex-2026-philippov-english-wsd-labels/)
- [↑ back to English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/)

## References

20 references, 2 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Krasimir Angelov. 2020. A parallel WordNet for English, Swedish and Bulgarian. In Proceedings of the 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 3008–3015, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Krasimir+Angelov%2E+2020%2E+A+parallel+WordNet+for+English%2C+Swedish+and+Bulgarian%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+12th+Language+Resources+and+Evaluation+Conference%2C+pages+3008%E2%80%933015%2C+Marseille%2C+France%2E+European+Lan)
2. Johann Bergh, Jörg Waitelonis, and Melanie Siegel. 2025. Leveraging LLMs for Constructing Word-Nets Automatically as Bilingual Resources. In Proceedings of the 2025 Global WordNet Conference. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Johann+Bergh%2C+J%C3%B6rg+Waitelonis%2C+and+Melanie+Siegel%2E+2025%2E+Leveraging+LLMs+for+Constructing+Word%2DNets+Automatically+as+Bilingual+Resources%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+2025+Global+WordNet+Conference%2E)
3. Michele Bevilacqua, Tommaso Pasini, Alessandro Raganato, and Roberto Navigli. 2021. Recent trends in word sense disambiguation: A survey. In Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-21, pages 4330–4338. International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization. Survey Track. [↗](https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2021/593)
4. John P. McCrae, Johann Bergh, Jörg Waitelonis, and Krasimir Angelov. 2026. Towards a comprehensive english wordnet-wikidata mapping. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Biennial Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC). [↗](https://doi.org/10.63317/2hv5jxde5mv5)
5. John P McCrae and David Cillessen. 2021. Towards a Linking between WordNet and Wikidata. In Proceedings of the 11th Global Wordnet Conference, pages 252–257. [↗](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.gwc-1.29)
6. John P. McCrae, Michael Wayne Goodman, Francis Bond, Alexandre Rademaker, Ewa Rudnicka, and Luis Morgado Da Costa. 2021. The globalwordnet formats: Updates for 2020. In Proceedings of the 11th Global Wordnet Conference, pages 91–99. [↗](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.gwc-1.11)
7. John P. McCrae, Haotian Zhu, Fei Xia, Al Waskow, and Kexin Gao. 2025. Remedying Gender Bias in Open English Wordnet. In Global WordNet Conference 2025. [↗](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.gwc-1.16)
8. Roberto Navigli, Michele Bevilacqua, Simone Conia, Dario Montagnini, and Francesco Cecconi. 2021. Ten Years of BabelNet: A Survey. In Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2021, Virtual Event / Montreal, Canada, 19-27 August 2021, pages 4559–4567. ijcai.org. [↗](https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2021/620)
9. Roberto Navigli and Simone Paolo Ponzetto. 2010. BabelNet: Building a Very Large Multilingual Semantic Network. In ACL 2010, Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, July 11-16, 2010, Uppsala, Sweden, pages 216–225. The Association for Computer Linguistics. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Roberto+Navigli+and+Simone+Paolo+Ponzetto%2E+2010%2E+BabelNet%3A+Building+a+Very+Large+Multilingual+Semantic+Network%2E+In+ACL+2010%2C+Proceedings+of+the+48th+Annual+Meeting+of+the+Association+for+Computational)
10. Geoffrey Nunberg. 1992. Systematic polysemy in lexicology and lexicography. In Proceedings of the 5th EURALEX International Congress, pages 386–396, Tampere, Finland. Tampereen YIiopisto. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Geoffrey+Nunberg%2E+1992%2E+Systematic+polysemy+in+lexicology+and+lexicography%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+5th+EURALEX+International+Congress%2C+pages+386%E2%80%93396%2C+Tampere%2C+Finland%2E+Tampereen+YIiopisto%2E)
11. Thomas Rebele, Fabian M. Suchanek, Johannes Hoffart, Joanna Biega, Erdal Kuzey, and Gerhard Weikum. 2016. YAGO: A multilingual knowledge base from Wikipedia, Wordnet, and Geonames. In The Semantic Web - ISWC 2016 - 15th International Semantic Web Conference, Kobe, Japan, October 17-21, 2016, Proceedings, Part II, volume 9982 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 177–185. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46547-0_19)
12. Özge Sevgili, Artem Shelmanov, Mikhail Arkhipov, Alexander Panchenko, and Chris Biemann. 2022. Neural entity linking: A survey of models based on deep learning. Semantic Web, 13(3):527– 570. [↗](https://doi.org/10.3233/sw-222986)
13. Antonio Toral, Rafael Muñoz, and Monica Monachini. 2008. Named Entity WordNet. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2008, 26 May - 1 June 2008, Marrakech, Morocco. European Language Resources Association. 8. [↗](https://doi.org/10.63317/3ew5oq5r5cri)
14. Language Resource References Christiane Fellbaum. 2010. WordNet, pages 231– 243. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Language+Resource+References+Christiane+Fellbaum%2E+2010%2E+WordNet%2C+pages+231%E2%80%93+243%2E+Springer+Netherlands%2C+Dordrecht%2E)
15. John P. McCrae, Alexandre Rademaker, Francis Bond, Ewa Rudnicka, and Christiane Fellbaum. 2019. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=John+P%2E+McCrae%2C+Alexandre+Rademaker%2C+Francis+Bond%2C+Ewa+Rudnicka%2C+and+Christiane+Fellbaum%2E+2019%2E)
16. English WordNet 2019 – An Open-Source WordNet for English. In Proceedings of the 10th Global WordNet Conference – GWC 2019. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=English+WordNet+2019+%E2%80%93+An+Open%2DSource+WordNet+for+English%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+10th+Global+WordNet+Conference+%E2%80%93+GWC+2019%2E) [our card](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/lex-2019-mccrae-english-wordnet/)
17. John P. McCrae, Ewa Rudnicka, and Francis Bond. 2020. English wordnet: A new open-source wordnet for english. K Lexical News, (28):37–44. [↗](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4382319)
18. George A. Miller. 1995. WordNet: a lexical database for English. Commun. ACM, 38(11):39–41. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1145/219717.219748) [our card](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/lex-1994-miller-wordnet/)
19. Roberto Navigli, Michele Bevilacqua, Simone Conia, Dario Montagnini, and Francesco Cecconi. 2021. Ten Years of BabelNet: A Survey. In Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2021, Virtual Event / Montreal, Canada, 19-27 August 2021, pages 4559–4567. ijcai.org. [↗](https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2021/620)
20. Roberto Navigli and Simone Paolo Ponzetto. 2010. BabelNet: Building a Very Large Multilingual Semantic Network. In ACL 2010, Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, July 11-16, 2010, Uppsala, Sweden, pages 216–225. The Association for Computer Linguistics. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Roberto+Navigli+and+Simone+Paolo+Ponzetto%2E+2010%2E+BabelNet%3A+Building+a+Very+Large+Multilingual+Semantic+Network%2E+In+ACL+2010%2C+Proceedings+of+the+48th+Annual+Meeting+of+the+Association+for+Computational)