MUHIT
MUHIT (
MUltilingual
Harmonized d
Ic
Tionary) is a multilingual electronic dictionary where entries have been interlinked by sense.
In MUHIT, natural language word forms have been associated to a uniform concept identifier, which makes possible to search for words with the same sense in the same language or in different languages.
The name "Muhit" has been inspired by the Arabic word المحيط (al-Muhit), which means "Ocean" and "comprehensive", and its part of one of the most celebrated Arabic dictionaries (al-Qamus al-Muhit), compiled by al-Firuzabadi (1329–1414) and widely used for centuries.
MUHIT contains more than 14,000,000 word forms in more than 50 languages.
The number of entries varies from language to language and has been continously increased.
The exact figures may be found at the
Language Report.
All entries have been introduced through the
UNLarium, a crowdsourcing environment used for creating language resources, which has been receiving new contributions every day, from freelancers, partners and volunteers, in different projects.
MUHIT is intended mainly for cross-language word search.
Users have to type a word form in the search box and press the button at its right side.
The system searches for the string in all existing dictionaries.
This search is performed not only for the citation forms of the words (the ordinary headwords of most dictionaries) but for all existing inflections as well.
This means that, in order to find cross-language synonyms for "to live", you may type "live", "lived", "lives", "living" etc.
The results are displayed in all languages where the string could be found, and bring the following features, whenever available:
The set of synonyms in the same language and translations in other languages
The features and inflections of the entry
The author of the entry
The sets of synonyms are also browsable, which makes possible to navigate further in order to find correspondences for related words in the same language and in different languages.
The search returns any string matching the query (xyz will return xyz).
For wildcards, use _ (for one single character) or % (for any number of characters, even zero). For instance:
- x_z will return any string beginning with x and ending with z with one character in between;
- x%z will return any string beginning with x and ending with z with any characters in between;
Dictionaries constitute a dynamic and everlasting effort of describing the repertoire of natural languages.
The UNDL Foundation has been investing a lot in creating resources for UNL-based projects but there is always much more to be done in order to include every language and every entry, and perhaps you may help us.
If you would like to have results for a given language, you have two options:
- You may join the UNLweb, the UNDL Foundation language resources management system, and help us creating dictionaries and grammars; or
- You may sponsor a given language, by making a donation to the UNDL Foundation to help us keep increasing and extending our natural language resources, which are actually available to anyone (and not only to the UNL community).
Many results are not satisfying yet, but every entry introduced in the UNL
arium is expected to be double-checked.
For the time being, we have been investing in increasing the lexical databases rather than in verifying the existing entries, although this process has been already initiated for some languages.
In any case, you may report a problem by clicking over the button
which appears at the right side of the entry.
This will help us to improve the quality of the resources.
The Universal Networking Language (UNL) has been, since 1996, a unique initiative to reduce
language barriers and strengthen cross-cultural communication in the framework
of the United Nations. It is a knowledge representation
language that has been used for several different tasks in natural language
engineering, such as machine translation, multilingual document generation,
summarization, information retrieval and semantic reasoning.
The UNDL Foundation is a non-profit organization based in
Geneva, Switzerland, which has received, from the United Nations, the mandate
for implementing the Universal Networking Language (UNL).
The UNL is an open and free initiative.
There are two main ways of participating in the UNLweb: as an individual, or as an organization. Individuals work as language specialists or computer specialists. They may work either as volunteers (in non-funded projects or languages) or as freelancers (in funded projects and languages). Organizations work as partners, and may play linguistic, computational or social roles, depending on their vocation. For further information, check
here or write to
info@unlweb.net.
