wiktextract 0.1.2

Wiktionary dump file parser and multilingual data extractor

Wiktextract

Wiktionary dump file parser and multilingual data extractor

Overview

Thois is a Python3 package for extracting information from Wiktionary data dumps. It reads the enwiktionary-<date>-pages-articles.xml.bz2 file (or corresponding files from other wiktionaries) and returns Python dictionaries containing most of the information from Wiktionary.

The library is capable of extracting information for any language. However, so far it has mostly been tested with English and Finnish, and to some extent German and Spanish. Changes to extract information for any additional languages are likely to be small. Basic information extraction most likely works out of the box for any language.

The library extracts glosses, parts-of-speech, declension/conjugation information where available, translations for all languages when available, pronunciations (including audio file links), qualifiers including usage notes, word forms, links between words including hypernyms, hyponyms, holonyms, meronyms, related words, derived terms, compounds, alternative forms, etc. Links to Wikipedia pages, Wikidata identifiers, and other such data are also extracted when available. For many classes of words, a word sense is annotated with specific information such as what word it is a form of, what is the RGB value of the color it represents, what is the numeric value of a number, what SI unit it represents, etc.

This library will be useful for many natural language processing, semantic parsing, machine translation, and language generation applications both in research and industry.

The library can be easily used to extract machine translation dictionaries, language understanding dictionaries, semantically annotated dictionaries, and morphological dictionaries with declension/conjugation information (where this information is available for the target language). Dozens of languages have extensive vocabulary in enwiktionary, and several thousand languages have partial coverage.

The wiktwords script makes extracting the information for use by other tools trivial without writing a single line of code. It extracts the information specified by command options for languages specified on the command line, and writes the extracted data to a file or standard output in JSON format for processing by other tools.

As far as we know, this is the most comprehensive tool available for extracting information from Wiktionary as of November 2018.

Installing

To install wiktextract, use:

git clone https://github.com/tatuylonen/wiktextract.git
cd wiktextract
python3 setup.py install

This will install the wiktextract module and the wiktwords script.

Note that this software has currently only been tested with Python3.

There should be no fundamental reason why back-porting to Python 2.7 would be difficult; it just hasn't been tested yet. Please report back if you test and make this work with Python2.

Using the command-line tool

The wiktwords script is the easiest way to extract data from Wiktionary. Just download the data dump file from dumps.wikimedia.org and run the script. The correct dump file has a name something like enwiktionary-<date>-pages-articles.xml.bz2.

The simplest command line is:

wiktwords data/enwiktionary-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2 --out wikt.words --language English

You may want to add command line options:

• --out FILE: specifies the name of the file to write (specifying "-" as the file writes to stdout)
• --language LANGUAGE: extracts the given language (this option may be specified multiple times; by default, English and Translingual words are extracted)
• --list-languages: prints a list of supported language names
• --translations: causes translations to be captured
• --pronunciation: causes pronunciation information to be captured
• --statistics: prints useful statistics at the end
• --pages-dir DIR: save all wiktionary pages under this directory (mostly for debugging)
• --help: displays help text

Extracting all of English Wiktionary may take about an hour, depending on the speed of your system.

Calling the library

The library can be called as follows:

import wiktextract

ctx = wiktextract.parse_wiktionary(
    path, word_cb,
    capture_cb=None,
    capture_languages=["English", "Translingual"],
    capture_translations=False,
    capture_pronunciation=False):

The parse_wiktionary call will call word_cb(data) for words found on every page in Wiktionary. data is information about a single word and part-of-speech as a dictionary (multiple senses of the same part-of-speech are combined into the same dictionary). It is in the same format as the JSON-formatted dictionaries returned by the wiktwords tool (see below).

capture_cb(title, text) is called for every page before extracting any words from it. It should return True if the page should be analyzed, and False if the page should be ignored. It can also be used to write certain pages to disk or capture certain pages for different analyses (e.g., extracting hierarchies, classes, thesauri, or topic-specific word lists). If this callback is None, all pages are analyzed.

capture_languages should be a list, tuple, or set of language names to capture. It defaults to ["English", "Translingual"].

capture_translations can be set to True to capture translation information for words. Translation information seems to be most widely available for the English language, which has translations into other languages. The translation information increases the size and loading timne of the captured data substantially, so this is disabled by default.

capture_pronunciation can be set to True t capture pronunciation information for words. Typically, this includes IPA transcriptions and any audio files included in the word entries, along with other information. However, the type and amount of pronunciation information varies widely between languages. This is disabled by default since many applications won't need the information.

Format of the extracted word entries

Information returned for each word is a dictionary. The dictionary has the following keys (others may also be present or added later):

• word: the word form
• pos: part-of-speech, such as "noun", "verb", "adj", "adv", "pron", "determiner", "prep" (preposition), "postp" (postposition), and many others.
• senses: word senses for this word/part-of-speech (see below)
• conjugation: conjugation/declension entries found for the word
• heads: part-of-speech specific head tags for the word. Useful for, e.g., obtaining comparatives, superlatives, and other inflection information for many languages. Each value is a dictionary, basically containing the arguments of the corresponding template in Wiktionary, with the template name under "template_name".
• hyphenation: list of hyphenations for the word when available. Each hyphenation is a vector of syllables.
• pinyin: for Chinese words, the romanized translitteration, when available
• synonyms: synonym linkages for the word (see below)
• antonyms: antonym linkages for the word (see below)
• hypernyms: hypernym linkages for the word (see below)
• holonyms: linkages indicating being part of something (see below) (not systematically encoded)
• meronyms: linkages indicating having a part (see below) (fairly rare)
• derived: derived word linkages for the word (see below)
• related: related word linkages for the word (see below)
• sounds: contains pronunciation information when collected (see below)
• translations: contains translation information when collected (see below)

Word senses

Each part-of-speech may have multiple glosses under the senses key. Each sense is a dictionary that may contain the following keys (among others, and more may be added in the future):

• glosses: list of gloss strings for the word sense (usually only one). This has been cleaned, and should be straightforward text with no tagging.
• nonglosses: list of gloss-like strings but that are not traditional glossary entries describing the word's meaning
• tags: list of qualifiers and tags for the gloss. This is a list of strings, and may include words such as "archaic", "colloquial", "present", "plural", "person", "organism", "british", "chemistry", "given name", "surname", "female", and many othes (new words may appear arbitrarily). Some effort has been put into trying to canonicalize various sources and styles of annotation into a consistent set of tags, but it is impossible to do an exact job at this.
• senseid: list of identifiers collected for the sense. Some entries have a Wikidata identifier (Q) here; others may have other identifiers. Currently sense ids are not very widely annotated in Wiktionary.
• wikipedia: link to wikipedia page from the word sense/gloss
• topics: topic categories specified for the sense (these may also be in "tags")
• taxon: links to taxonomical data
• categories: Category links specified for the page
• color: specification of RGB color values (hex or CSS color name)
• value: value represented by the word (e.g., for numerals)
• unit: information about some represent units, particularly SI units
• alt_of: list of words that this sense is an alternative form or abbreviation of
• inflection_of: list of words that this sense is an inflection of
• conjugation: list of templates indicating conjugation/declension (list of dictionaries containing the arguments of the Wiktionary template, with template name under "template_name")

Linkages to other words

Linkages (synonyms, antonyms, hypernyms, derived words, holonyms, meronyms, derived, related) are lists of dictionaries, where each dictionary can contain the following keys, among others:

• word: the word this links to (string)
• sense: text identifying the word sense (may not match gloss exactly) (string)
• tags: qualifiers specified for the sense (e.g., field of study, region, dialect, style). This is a list of strings.

Pronunciation

Pronunciation information is stored under the sounds key. It is a list of dictionaries, each of which may contain the following keys, among others:

• audios: list of audio files referenced (list of tuples)
• ipas: pronunciation specifications in IPA format as tuples (lang, ipatext)
• special_ipas: special IPA-like specifications (sometimes macros calling code in Wiktionary), as list of dictionaries
• en_pr: pronunciations in English pronunciation format as list of strings
• tags: qualifiers associated with the pronunciation specification, such as dialect, country, etc.

Translations

Translations, when captured, are stored under the translations key in the word's data. They are stored in a list of dictionaries, where each dictionary has the following keys (and possibly others):

• lang: the language that the translation is for (Wiktionary's 2 or 3-letter language code)
• word: the translation in the specified language
• sense: optional sense for which the translation is (this is a free-text string, and may not match any gloss exactly)
• alt: an optional alternative form of the translation
• roman: an optional romanization of the translation.

Known issues

• Extracting linkages (hypernyms, etc.) does not capture all links. It is fairly common to use simple lists with hyperlinks for these linkages, and such hyperlinks are not currently extracted. The intention is to fix this soon.
• Some holonyms/meronyms are currently stored under the sense, while other linkages are under the word. This should be looked into and made consistent.
• Some information that is global for a page, such as category links for the page, may only be included in the last part-of-speech defined on the page or even the last language defined on the page. This should be fixed.

This software is still quite new and should still be considered a beta version.

Dependencies

This package depends on the following other packages:

• lxml
• wikitextparser

Contributing

Please email to ylo at clausal.com if you wish to contribute, have patches, or suggestions.

License

Copyright (c) 2018 Tatu Ylonen. This package is free for both commercial and non-commercial use. It is licensed under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for details.

Credit and linking to the project's web site and/or citing any future papers on the project would be highly appreciated.