MUHIT



What is MUHIT?


MUHIT (MUltilingual Harmonized dIcTionary) 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.

What is in there?


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.

How to use the system?


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.

Which are the search options?


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:

What if there is no result in a given language?


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:

What if the result is not that good?


Many results are not satisfying yet, but every entry introduced in the UNLarium 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.

What is UNL?


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.
[read more at the UNL Wiki]

Who are you?


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).

[read more at the UNDL Foundation website]

How to participate?


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.