Building a WordNet for Dravidian Languages

This paper attempts to emphasize the need for a standalone and independent Dravidian WordNet. Since the morphology and lexical concepts of Dravidian languages are closer to each other than to a language from a different family, it is proposed to base the Dravidian WordNet on a Dravidian Language. A signifi-cant amount of work has already been done in Tamil language to understand the ontological structure and vocabulary. Based on the find-ings of these studies, it is proposed to build a Tamil WordNet first and then extend it to complete the Dravidian WordNet. A prototype model for the Tamil WordNet is also proposed in this paper.