Zawilinski: a library for studying grammar in Wiktionary

Track: Posters
Authors: Zachary Kurmas (Grand Valley State University, USA)

Abstract
We present Zawilinski, a Java library that supports the extraction and analysis of grammatical data in Wiktionary. Zawilinski can efficiently (1) filter Wiktionary for content pertaining to a specified language, and (2) extract a word’s inflections from its Wiktionary entry. We have thus far used Zawilinski to (1) measure the correctness of the inflections for a subset of the Polish words in the English Wiktionary and to (2) show that this grammatical data is very stable. (Only 131 out of 4748 Polish words have had their inflection data corrected.) We also explain Zawilinski’s key features and discuss how it can be used to simplify the development of additional grammar-based analyses.