---
title: "Inclusion of Lithological terms (rocks and minerals) in The Open"
description: "General-purpose WordNet covers geoscience vocabulary poorly, which hampers automatic processing… 25 references, cited by 1 paper here."
authors: ["Alexandre Tessarollo", "Alexandre Rademaker"]
year: 2020
venue: "Proceedings of the LREC 2020 Workshop on Multimodal Wordnets (MMW2020)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/2020.mmw-1.6/"
licence: "CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/tessarollo-2020-inclusion-lithological-terms-rocks-minerals/"
---
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# Inclusion of Lithological terms (rocks and minerals) in The Open Wordnet for English

**Authors:** Alexandre Tessarollo and [Alexandre Rademaker](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/alexandre-rademaker/) · **Year:** 2020 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the LREC 2020 Workshop on Multimodal Wordnets (MMW2020) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2020.mmw-1.6/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2020.mmw-1.6.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W3032703714)

**Citations:** 1 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · 1 in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
General-purpose WordNet covers geoscience vocabulary poorly, which hampers automatic processing of Oil & Gas documents, where rock type (lithology) is one of the most frequently discussed properties. The authors extend the Open WordNet for English (OWN-EN), a fork of Princeton WordNet 3.0, with lithological terms from the GBA Thesaurus. GBA is a SKOS/RDF ontology maintained by the Geological Survey of Austria, aligned with IUGS recommendations and cross-linked to several other geological resources. The work proceeded in three stages: a proof of concept, a larger extension that was evaluated, and a full import of all GBA lithology terms. SKOS hierarchy links were converted into WordNet hypernymy, and GBA's encyclopedic descriptions were rewritten as dictionary-style genus-plus-differentia glosses. The authors also repaired flaws in WordNet's existing rock hierarchy. On a geoscience corpus processed with Freeling 4.1, the extended resource changed the analysis of 910 words. Most of these changes moved words to synsets that already existed, which shows that fixing relations matters as much as adding new entries.

## Key points
- Source: the GBA Thesaurus lithology vocabulary, which uses SKOS broader/narrower, prefLabel and definition, with English and German strings. Its exact-match links tie it to five external resources: DBpedia, GeoSciML, INSPIRE, the British Geological Survey vocabularies and WikiData.
- Released in the OWN-EN GitHub repository: the extended wordnet plus a mapping from GBA URIs to OWN-EN sense keys, which indirectly links OWN-EN to all of GBA's partner resources.
- Hierarchy fixes found in WordNet:
  - Nineteen synsets attached directly under rock (14696793-n) instead of under igneous, metamorphic or sedimentary rock.
  - Limestone carrying a redundant double parent.
  - The resolution kept the everyday "rock" synset and added GBA's three top material concepts beneath which GBA terms were placed.
- Evaluation on a corpus from a USGS / Geological Survey of Canada / BGS publication:
  - 910 words were analysed differently.
  - 9 words with wrong PoS were corrected, but only 3 of them went to new synsets.
  - Of 78 previously unsensed words, 69 went to existing synsets and 9 to new ones.
  - 184 words switched between pre-existing synsets.
  - 639 occurrences of "sandstone" moved to the new synset.
- "Formation" shifted from the process sense to the geological sense in 59 occurrences; manual checking judged 51 of these shifts correct.

## Interesting ideas
- Treat an external domain thesaurus as authoritative and import it without re-judging its content, so the effort goes into mapping rather than debating domain correctness.
- Turn SKOS broader links into hypernymy, but rewrite the source's long scientific descriptions as short genus-plus-differentia glosses. Glosses of this form are machine-usable and consistent with the rest of the lexicon.
- Keep a persistent mapping from external URIs to sense keys, which makes later re-syncs with new source releases straightforward and lets links to third-party resources come along for free.
- Evaluate a lexicon change by diffing whole-pipeline output on a domain corpus and hand-checking the changed cases, as with 51 of 59 "formation" switches judged right. This shows real impact, including regressions.
- Most observed gains came from restructuring existing synsets rather than adding new ones, which suggests auditing hierarchy errors such as redundant parents and overly flat children.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (world): Mova's ontology layer could import specialist vocabularies (geology, trade goods) wholesale, each tagged with its provenance, so every inherited fact stays explainable.
- **I2** (world): definitions written as "X is a Y that Z" can be compiled straight into is-a plus distinguishing-property facts in the knowledge graph.
- **I3** (world): storing Wikidata/GBA URIs next to WordNet sense keys would let Mova re-import updated ontologies and connect to Wikidata without manual relinking.
- **I4** (learn): every ontology update could be gated by a before/after diff of sense and frame assignments on a fixed corpus, with sampled manual checks acting as a negative control.
- **I5** (world): an automatic lint over the WordNet-derived ontology could flag redundant is-a edges and flat sibling sets before they distort entity typing.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/pontificia-universidade-catolica-do-rio-de-janeiro/) — University, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil · 5 works · 241 citations

Also on the byline: [Fundação Getulio Vargas](https://ror.org/01evzkn27).

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🧭 Topics (1): [English](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/english/) · 2,263 works

## Cite

Cite as: Alexandre Tessarollo and Alexandre Rademaker. 2020. Inclusion of Lithological terms (rocks and minerals) in The Open Wordnet for English. Proceedings of the LREC 2020 Workshop on Multimodal Wordnets (MMW2020).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{tessarollo2020inclusion,
  title = {{Inclusion of Lithological terms (rocks and minerals) in The Open Wordnet for English}},
  author = {Alexandre Tessarollo and Alexandre Rademaker},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the LREC 2020 Workshop on Multimodal Wordnets (MMW2020)},
  year = {2020},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2020.mmw-1.6/}
}
```

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## References

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*Updated 31 October 2026*