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Wiktextract

This is a utility and Python package for extracting data from Wiktionary.

Please report issues on github and we'll try to address them reasonably soon.

Some extracted Wiktionary editions data are available for browsing and downloading at https://kaikki.org, the website will be updated every few days.

Note: extracting all data for all languages from the English Wiktionary may take from an hour to several days, depending on your computer. Expanding Lua modules is not cheap, but it enables superior extraction quality and maintainability! You may want to look at the data downloads instead of running it yourself.

Overview

This is a Python package and tool for extracting information from various Wiktionary data dumps, most notably and completely the English edition (enwiktionary). Note that an edition of Wiktionary contains extensive dictionaries and inflectional information for many languages, not just the language it has been written in.

One thing that distinguishes this tool from any system we're aware of is that this tool expands templates and Lua macros in Wiktionary. That enables much more accurate rendering and extraction of glosses, word senses, inflected forms, and pronunciations. It also makes the system much easier to maintain. All this results in much higher extraction quality and accuracy.

The English edition extraction 'module' extracts glosses, parts-of-speech, declension/conjugation information when 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.

Other editions are less complete (or the Wiktionary edition itself doesn't necessarily have the same width of data), but we try to cover the basics.

This tool extracts information for all languages that have data in the wiktionary edition. It also extracts translingual data and information about characters (anything that has an entry in Wiktionary).

This tool reads a <language-code>wiktionary-<date>-pages-articles.xml.bz2 dump file and outputs JSONL-format (json objects separated with newlines) dictionaries containing most of the information in Wiktionary. The dump files can be downloaded from https:// dumps.wikimedia.org.

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

The tool can be 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 JSONL format (json objects separated with newlines) for processing by other tools.

As far as we know, this is the most comprehensive tool available for extracting information from Wiktionary as of December 2020.

If you find this tool and/or the pre-extracted data helpful, please give this a star on github!

Pre-extracted data

For most people, it may be easiest to just download pre-expanded data. Please see https://kaikki.org/dictionary/rawdata.html. The raw wiktextract data, extracted category tree, extracted templates and modules, as well as a bulk download of audio files for pronunciations in both .ogg and .mp3 formats are available.

There is a also download link at the bottom of every page and a button to view the JSON produced for each page. You can download all data, data for a specific language, data for just a single word, or data for a list of related words (e.g., a particular part-of-speech or words relating to a particular topic or having a particular inflectional form). All downloads are in JSON Lines format (each line is a separate JSON object). The bigger downloads are also available in compressed form.

Some people have asked for the full data as a single JSON object (instead of the current one JSON object per line format). I've decided to keep it as a JSON object per line, because loading all the data into Python requires about 120 GB of memory. It is much easier to process the data line-by-line, especially if you are only interested in a part of the information. You can easily read the files using the following code:

import json

with open("filename.json", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    for line in f:
        data = json.loads(line)
        ... # parse the data in this record

If you want to collect all the data into a list, you can read the file into a list with:

import json

lst = []
with open("filename.json", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    for line in f:
        data = json.loads(line)
        lst.append(data)

You can also easily pretty-print the data into a more human-readable form using:

print(json.dumps(data, indent=2, sort_keys=True, ensure_ascii=False))

Here is a pretty-printed example of an extracted word entry for the word thrill as an English verb (only one part-of-speech is shown here):

{
  "categories": [
    "Emotions"
  ],
  "derived": [
    {
      "word": "enthrill"
    }
  ],
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "thrills",
      "tags": [
        "present",
        "simple",
        "singular",
        "third-person"
      ]
    },
    {
      "form": "thrilling",
      "tags": [
        "present"
      ]
    },
    {
      "form": "thrilled",
      "tags": [
        "participle",
        "past",
        "simple"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "thrill (third-person singular simple present thrills, present participle thrilling, simple past and past participle thrilled)",
      "name": "en-verb"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "verb",
  "senses": [
    {
      "glosses": [
        "To suddenly excite someone, or to give someone great pleasure; to electrify; to experience such a sensation."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "ergative",
        "figuratively"
      ]
    },
    {
      "glosses": [
        "To (cause something to) tremble or quiver."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "ergative"
      ]
    },
    {
      "glosses": [
        "To perforate by a pointed instrument; to bore; to transfix; to drill."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "obsolete"
      ]
    },
    {
      "glosses": [
        "To hurl; to throw; to cast."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "obsolete"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "sounds": [
    {
      "ipa": "/\u03b8\u0279\u026al/"
    },
    {
      "ipa": "[\u03b8\u027e\u032a\u030a\u026a\u026b]",
      "tags": [
        "UK",
        "US"
      ]
    },
    {
      "ipa": "[\u03b8\u027e\u032a\u030a\u026al]",
      "tags": [
        "Ireland"
      ]
    },
    {
      "ipa": "[t\u032a\u027e\u032a\u030a\u026al]",
      "tags": [
        "Ireland"
      ]
    },
    {
      "rhymes": "-\u026al"
    },
    {
      "audio": "en-us-thrill.ogg",
      "mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/d/db/En-us-thrill.ogg/En-us-thrill.ogg.mp3",
      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/En-us-thrill.ogg",
      "tags": [
        "US"
      ],
      "text": "Audio (US)"
    }
  ],
  "translations": [
    {
      "code": "nl",
      "lang": "Dutch",
      "sense": "suddenly excite someone, or to give someone great pleasure; to electrify",
      "word": "opwinden"
    },
    {
      "code": "fi",
      "lang": "Finnish",
      "sense": "suddenly excite someone, or to give someone great pleasure; to electrify",
      "word": "syk\u00e4hdytt\u00e4\u00e4"
    },
    {
      "code": "fi",
      "lang": "Finnish",
      "sense": "suddenly excite someone, or to give someone great pleasure; to electrify",
      "word": "riemastuttaa"
    },
...
    {
      "code": "tr",
      "lang": "Turkish",
      "sense": "slight quivering of the heart that accompanies a cardiac murmur",
      "word": "\u00e7arp\u0131nt\u0131"
    }
  ],
  "wikipedia": [
    "thrill"
  ],
  "word": "thrill"
}

Getting started

Installing

Use container:

$ podman run -it --rm ghcr.io/tatuylonen/wiktextract --help

Install from source:

On Linux (example from Ubuntu 20.04), you may need to first install the build-essential and python3-dev packages with apt update && apt install build-essential python3-dev python3-pip lbzip2.

git clone https://github.com/tatuylonen/wiktextract.git
cd wiktextract
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
python -m pip install -U pip
python -m pip install -e .

Use pip install command's --force-reinstall and -e option to reinstall the wikitextprocessor package from source in editable mode if you want to update both packages' code with git pull.

Running tests

This package includes tests written using the unittest framework. The test dependencies can be installed with the command python -m pip install -e .[dev].

To run the tests, use the following command in the top-level directory:

make test

Expected performance

Extracting all data for all languages from English Wiktionary takes about 1.25 hours on a 128-core dual AMD EPYC 7702 system. The performance is expected to be approximately linear with the number of processor cores, provided you have enough memory (about 10GB/core or 5GB/hyperthread recommended).

As the extractor expands, these times will change.

You can control the number of parallel processes to use with the --num-processes option; the default is to use the number of available cores/hyperthreads.

You can download the full pre-extracted data from kaikki.org. The pre-extraction is updated regularly with the latest Wiktionary dump. Using the pre-extracted data may be the easiest option unless you have special needs or want to modify the code.

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 the name enwiktionary-<date>-pages-articles.xml.bz2.

An example of a typical invocation for extracting all data would be:

wiktwords --all --all-languages --out data.json enwiktionary-20230801-pages-articles.xml.bz2

If you wish to modify the code or test processing individual pages, the following may also be useful:

  1. Pass a path to save database file that you can use for quickly processing individual pages:
wiktwords --db-path en_20230801.db enwiktionary-20230801-pages-articles.xml.bz2
  1. To process a single page and produce a human-readable output file for debugging:
wiktwords --db-path en_20230801.db --all --all-languages --out outfile --page page_title

The following command-line options can be used to control its operation:

  • --out FILE: specifies the name of the file to write (specifying "-" as the file writes to stdout)
  • --all-languages: extract words for all available languages
  • --language-code LANGUAGE_CODE: extracts the given language (this option may be specified multiple times; defaults to dump file language code and mul(Translingual))
  • --language-name LANGUAGE_NAME: Similar to --language-code except this option accepts language name
  • --dump-file-language-code LANGUAGE_CODE: specifies the language code for the Wiktionary edition that the dump file is for (defaults to "en"; "zh" is supported and others are being added)
  • --skip-extraction: Used to create a database file from the dump file without waiting for the extraction process to complete.
  • --all: causes all data to be captured for the selected languages
  • --translations: causes translations to be captured
  • --pronunciation: causes pronunciation information to be captured
  • --linkages: causes linkages (synonyms etc.) to be captured
  • --examples: causes usage examples to be captured
  • --etymologies: causes etymology information to be captured
  • --descendants: causes descendants information to be captured
  • --inflections: causes inflection tables to be captured
  • --redirects: causes redirects to be extracted
  • --pages-dir DIR: save all wiktionary pages under this directory (mostly for debugging)
  • --db-path PATH: save/use database from this path (for debugging)
  • --page FILE or TITLE: read page from file or database, can be specified multiple times(first line must be "TITLE: pagetitle"; file should use UTF-8 encoding)
  • --num-processes PROCESSES: use this many parallel processes (needs 4GB/process)
  • --human-readable: print human-readable JSON with indentation (no longer machine-readable)
  • --override PATH: override pages with files in this directory (first line of the file must be TITLE: pagetitle)
  • --templates-file: extract Template namespace to this tar file
  • --modules-file: extract Module namespace to this tar file
  • --categories-file: extract Wiktionary category tree into this file as JSON (see description below)
  • --inflection_tables_file: extract and expand tables into this file as wikitext; use this to create tests
  • --help: displays help text (with some more options than listed here)

Calling the library

While this package has been mostly intended to be used using the wiktwords command, it is also possible to call this as a library. Underneath, this uses the wikitextprocessor module. For more usage examples please read the wiktwords.py and wiktionary.py files.

This code can be called from an application as follows:

from wiktextract import (
    WiktextractContext,
    WiktionaryConfig,
    parse_wiktionary,
)
from wikitextprocessor import Wtp

config = WiktionaryConfig(
    dump_file_lang_code="en",
    capture_language_codes=["en", "mul"],
    capture_translations=True,
    capture_pronunciation=True,
    capture_linkages=True,
    capture_compounds=True,
    capture_redirects=True,
    capture_examples=True,
    capture_etymologies=True,
    capture_descendants=True,
    capture_inflections=True,
)
wxr = WiktextractContext(Wtp(), config)

RECOGNIZED_NAMESPACE_NAMES = [
    "Main",
    "Category",
    "Appendix",
    "Project",
    "Thesaurus",
    "Module",
    "Template",
    "Reconstruction"
]

namespace_ids = {
    wxr.wtp.NAMESPACE_DATA.get(name, {}).get("id")
    for name in RECOGNIZED_NAMESPACE_NAMES
}
with open("output.json", "w", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    parse_wiktionary(wxr, dump_path, None, False, namespace_ids, f)

The capture arguments default to True, so they only need to be set if some values are not to be captured (note that the wiktwords program sets them to False unless the --all or specific capture options are used).

parse_wiktionary()

def parse_wiktionary(
    wxr: WiktextractContext,
    dump_path: str,
    num_processes: Optional[int],
    phase1_only: bool,
    namespace_ids: Set[int],
    out_f: TextIO,
    human_readable: bool = False,
    override_folders: Optional[List[str]] = None,
    skip_extract_dump: bool = False,
    save_pages_path: Optional[str] = None,
) -> None:

The parse_wiktionary function will call word_cb(data) for words and redirects found in the Wiktionary dump. data is information about a single word and part-of-speech as a dictionary and may include several word senses. It may also be a redirect (indicated by the presence of a "redirect" key in the dictionary). It is in the same format as the JSONL-formatted dictionaries returned by the wiktwords tool.

Its arguments are as follows:

  • wxr (WiktextractContext) - a Wiktextract-level processing context containing fields that point to a Wtp context and WiktionarConfig object (below). ** wxr.wtp (Wtp) - a wikitextprocessor processing context. The number of parallel processes to use can be given as the num_threads argument to the constructor, and a database file path can be provided as the db_path argument. ** wxr.config (WiktionaryConfig) - a configuration object describing what to exctract (see below)
  • dump_path (str) - path to a Wiktionary dump file (*-pages-articles.xml.bz2)
  • phase1_only - if this is set to True, then only a cache file will be created but no extraction will take place. In this case the Wtp constructor should probably be given the db_path argument when creating wxr.wtp.
  • namespace_ids - a set of namespace ids, pages with namespace ids that are not included in this set won't be processed. Avaliable id values can be found in wikitextprocessor project's data/en/namespaces.json file and the Wiktionary *.xml.bz2 dump file.
  • out_f - output file object.
  • human_readable - if set to True, the output JSON will be formatted with indentation.
  • override_folders - override pages with files in these directories.
  • skip_extract_dump - skip extract dump file if database exists.
  • save_pages_path - path for storing extracted pages.

This call gathers statistics in wxr.config. This function will automatically parallelize the extraction. page_cb will be called in the parent process, however.

parse_page()

def parse_page(
    wxr: WiktextractContext, page_title: str, page_text: str
) -> List[Dict[str, str]]:
  • wxr (WiktextractContext) - a wiktextract context containing: ** wxr.wtp (Wtp) - a wikitextprocessor context ** wxr.config (WiktionaryConfig) - specifies what to capture and is also used
  • page_title (str) - the title to use for the page
  • page_text (str) - contents of the page (wikitext) for collecting statistics

PARTS_OF_SPEECH

This is a constant set of all part-of-speech values (pos key) that may occur in the extracted data. Note that the list is somewhat larger than what a conventional part-of-speech list would be.

class WiktextractContext(object)

The WiktextractContext object is used to hold the wikitextprocessor- specific Wtp context object and the wiktextract's WiktionaryConfig objects, and XXX in the future it will hold actual context that doesn't belong in Wtp and XXX WiktionaryConfig will be most probably integrated into the WiktextractContext object proper.

The constructor is called simply by supplying a Wtp and WiktionaryConfig object:

# Blanks slate for testing, usually
wxr = WiktextractContext(Wtp(), WiktionaryConfig())

or

# separately initialized config with a bunch of arguments like in the
# example in the -> class WiktionaryConfig(object)-section below
wxr = WiktextractContext(wtp, config)

if it is more convenient.

class WiktionaryConfig(object)

The WiktionaryConfig object is used for specifying what data to collect from Wiktionary and is also used for collecting statistics during extraction. Currently, it is a field of the WiktextractContext context object.

The constructor:

def __init__(
    self,
    dump_file_lang_code="en",
    capture_language_codes=["en", "mul"],
    capture_translations=True,
    capture_pronunciation=True,
    capture_linkages=True,
    capture_compounds=True,
    capture_redirects=True,
    capture_examples=True,
    capture_etymologies=True,
    capture_inflections=True,
    capture_descendants=True,
    verbose=False,
    expand_tables=False,
):

The arguments are as follows:

  • capture_language_codes (list/tuple/set of strings) - codes of languages for which to capture data. It defaults to ["en", "mul"]. To capture all languages, set it to None.
  • capture_translations (boolean) - set to False to disable capturing translations. Translation information seems to be most widely available for the English language, which has translations into other languages.
  • capture_pronunciation (boolean) - set to False to disable capturing pronunciations. Typically, pronunciations include IPA transcriptions and any audio files included in the word entries, along with other information (including dialectal tags). The type and amount of pronunciation information varies widely between languages.
  • capture_linkages (boolean) - set to False to disable capturing linkages between word, such as hypernyms, antonyms, synonyms, etc.
  • capture_compounds (boolean) - set to False to disable capturing compound words containing the word. Compound word capturing is not currently fully implemented.
  • capture_redirects (boolean) - set to False to disable capturing redirects. Redirects are not associated with any specific language and thus requesting them returns them for all words in all languages.
  • capture_examples (boolean) - set to False to disable capturing usage examples.
  • capture_etymologies (boolean) - set to False to disable capturing etymologies.
  • capture_descendants (boolean) - set to False to disable capturing descendants.
  • capture_inflections (boolean) - set to False to disable capturing inflection tables.

Format of extracted redirects

Some pages in Wiktionary are redirects. For these, word_cb will be called with data in a special format. In this case, the dictionary will have a redirect key, which will contain the page title that the entry redirects to. The title key contains the word/term that contains the redirect. Redirect entries do not have pos or any of the other fields. Redirects also are not associated with any language, so all redirects are always returned regardless of the captured languages (if extracting redirects has been requested).

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. The complete list of possible values returned by the package can be found in wiktextract.PARTS_OF_SPEECH.
  • lang - name of the language this word belongs to (e.g., English)
  • lang_code - Wiktionary language code corresponding to lang key (e.g., en)
  • senses - list of word senses (dictionaries) for this word/part-of-speech (see below)
  • forms - list of inflected or alternative forms specified for the word (e.g., plural, comparative, superlative, roman script version). This is a list of dictionaries, where each dictionary has a form key and a tags key. The tags identify what type of form it is. It may also contain "ipa", "roman", and "source" fields. The form can be "-" when the word is marked as not having that form (some of those will be word-specific, while others are language-specific; post-processing can drop such forms when no word has a value for that tag combination).
  • sounds - list of dictionaries containing pronunciation, hyphenation, rhyming, and related information. Each dictionary may have a tags key containing tags that clarify what kind of form that entry is. Different types of information are stored in different fields: ipa is IPA pronunciation, enPR is enPR pronunciation, audio is name of sound file in Wikimedia commons.
  • categories - list of non-disambiguated categories for the word
  • topics - list of non-disambiguated topics for the word
  • translations - non-disambiguated translation entries (see below)
  • etymology_text - etymology section as cleaned text
  • etymology_templates - templates and their arguments and expansions from the etymology section. These can be used to easily parse etymological relations. Certain common templates that do not signify etymological relations are not included.
  • etymology_number - for words with multiple numbered etymologies, this contains the number of the etymology under which this entry appeared
  • descendants - descendants of the word (see below)
  • synonyms - non-disambiguated synonym linkages for the word (see below)
  • antonyms - non-disambiguated antonym linkages for the word (see below)
  • hypernyms - non-disambiguated hypernym linkages for the word (see below)
  • holonyms - non-disambiguated linkages indicating being part of something (see below) (not systematically encoded)
  • meronyms - non-disambiguated linkages indicating having a part (see below) (fairly rare)
  • derived - non-disambiguated derived word linkages for the word (see below)
  • related - non-disambiguated related word linkages for the word (see below)
  • coordinate_terms - non-disambiguated coordinate term linkages for the word (see below)
  • wikidata - non-disambiguated Wikidata identifer
  • wiktionary - non-disambiguated page title in Wikipedia (possibly prefixed by language id)
  • head_templates: part-of-speech specific head tags for the word. This basically just captures the templates (their name and arguments) as a list of dictionaries. Most applications may want to ignore this.
  • inflection_templates - conjugation and declension templates found for the word, as dictionaries. These basically capture the language-specific inflection template for the word. Note that for some languages inflection information is also contained in head_templates. XXX in the very near future, we will start parsing inflections from the inflection tables into forms, so there is usually no need to use the inflection_templates data.

There may also be other fields.

Word senses

Each word entry 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.
  • raw_glosses - list of gloss strings for the word sense, with less cleaning than glosses. In particular, parenthesized parts that have been parsed from the gloss into tags and topics are still present here. This version may be easier for humans to interpret.
  • tags - list of qualifiers and tags for the gloss. This is a list of strings, and may include words such as "archaic", "colloquial", "present", "participle", "plural", "feminine", and many others (new words may appear arbitrarily).
  • categories - list of sense-disambiguated category names extracted from (a subset) of the Category links on the page
  • topics - list of sense-disambiguated topic names (kind of similar to categories but determined differently)
  • alt_of - list of words that his sense is an alternative form of; this is a list of dictionaries, with field word containing the linked word and optionally extra containing additional text
  • form_of - list of words that this sense is an inflected form of; this is a list of dictionaries, with field word containing the linked word and optionally extra containing additional text
  • translations - sense-disambiguated translation entries (see below)
  • synonyms - sense-disambiguated synonym linkages for the word (see below)
  • antonyms - sense-disambiguated antonym linkages for the word (see below)
  • hypernyms - sense-disambiguated hypernym linkages for the word (see below)
  • holonyms - sense-disambiguated linkages indicating being part of something (see below) (not systematically encoded)
  • meronyms - sense-disambiguated linkages indicating having a part (see below) (fairly rare)
  • coordinate_terms - sense-disambiguated coordinate_terms linkages (see below)
  • derived - sense-disambiguated derived word linkages for the word (see below)
  • related - sense-disambiguated related word linkages for the word (see below)
  • senseid - list of textual identifiers collected for the sense. If there is a QID for the entry (e.g., Q123), those are stored in the wikidata field.
  • wikidata - list of QIDs (e.g., Q123) for the sense
  • wikipedia - list of Wikipedia page titles (with optional language code prefix)
  • examples - list of usage examples, each example being a dictionary with text field containing the example text, optional ref field containing a source reference, optional english field containing English translation, optional type field containing example type (currently example or quotation if present), optional roman field containing romanization (for some languages written in non-Latin scripts), and optional (rare) note field contains English-language parenthesized note from the beginning of a non-english example.
  • english - if the word sense has a qualifier that could not be parsed, that qualifier is put in this field (rare). Most qualifiers are parsed into tags and/or topics. The gloss with the qualifier still present can be found in raw_glosses.

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:

  • ipa - pronunciation specifications as an IPA string /.../ or [...]
  • enpr - pronunciation in English pronunciation respelling
  • audio - name of a sound file in WikiMedia Commons
  • ogg_url - URL for an OGG Vorbis format sound file
  • mp3_url - URL for an MP3 format sound file
  • audio-ipa - IPA string associated with the audio file, generally giving IPA transcription of what is in the sound file
  • homophones - list of homophones for the word
  • hyphenation - list of hyphenations
  • tags - other labels or context information attached to the pronunciation entry (e.g., might indicate regional variant or dialect)
  • text - text associated with an audio file (often not very useful)

Note that Wiktionary audio files are available for bulk download at https://kaikki.org/dictionary/rawdata.html. Files in the download are named with the last component of the URL in ogg_url and/or mp3_url. Downloading them individually takes serveral days and puts unnecessary load on Wikimedia servers.

Translations

Translations are stored under the translations key in the word's data (if not sense-disambiguated) or in the word sense (if sense-disambiguated). They are stored in a list of dictionaries, where each dictionary has the following keys (and possibly others):

  • alt - optional alternative form of the translation (e.g., in a different script)
  • code - Wiktionary's 2 or 3-letter language code for the language the translation is for
  • english - English text, generally clarifying the target sense of the translation
  • lang the language name that the translation is for
  • note - optional text describing or commenting on the translation
  • roman - optional romanization of the translation (when in non-Latin characters)
  • sense - optional sense indicating the meaning for which this is a translation (this is a free-text string, and may not match any gloss exactly)
  • tags - optional list of qualifiers for the translations, e.g., gender
  • taxonomic - optional taxonomic name of an organism mentioned in the translation
  • word - the translation in the specified language (may be missing when note is present)

Etymologies

Etymological information is stored under the etymology_text and etymology_templates keys in the word's data. When multiple parts-of-speech are listed under the same etymology, the same data is copied to each part-of-speech entry under that etymology.

The etymology_text field contains the contents of the whole etymology section cleaned into human-readable text (i.e., templates have been expanded and HTML tags removed, among other things).

The etymology_templates field contains a list of templates from the etymology section. Some common templates considered not relevant for etymological information have been removed (e.g., redlink category and isValidPageName). The list also includes nested templates referenced from templates directly used in the etymology description. Each template in the list is a dictionary with the following keys:

  • name - name of the template
  • args - dictionary mapping argument names to their cleaned values. Positional arguments have keys that are numeric strings, starting with "1".
  • expansion - the (cleaned) text the template expands to.

Descendants

If a word has a "Descendants" section, the descendants key will appear in the word's data. It contains a list of objects corresponding to each line in the section, where each object has the following keys:

  • depth: The level of indentation of the current line. This can be used to track the hierarchical structure of the list.
  • templates: An array of objects corresponding to templates that appear on the line. The structure of each of these objects is the same as the structure of each object in etymology_templates.
  • text: The expanded and cleaned line text, akin to etymology_text.

descendants data will also appear for the special case of "Derived terms" and "Extensions" sections for words that are roots in reconstructed languages, as these sections have the same format.

Linkages to other words

Linkages (synonyms, antonyms, hypernyms, derived words, holonyms, meronyms, derived, related, coordinate_terms) are stored in the word's data if not sense-disambiguated, and in the word sense if sense-disambiguated. They are lists of dictionaries, where each dictionary can contain the following keys, among others:

  • alt - optional alternative form of the target (e.g., in a different script)
  • english - optional English text associated with the sense, usually identifying the linked target sense
  • roman - optional romanization of a linked word in a non-Latin script
  • sense - text identifying the word sense or context (e.g., "to rain very heavily")
  • tags: qualifiers specified for the sense (e.g., field of study, region, dialect, style)
  • taxonomic: optional taxonomic name associated with the linkage
  • topics: list of topic descriptors for the linkage (e.g., military)
  • word - the word this links to (string)

Category tree data format

The --categories-file option extracts the Wiktionary category tree as JSON into the specified file. The data is extracted from the Wiktionary Lua modules by evaluating them.

The data written to the JSON file is a dictionary, with the top-level keys roots and nodes.

Roots is a list of top-level nodes that are not children of other nodes. Fundamental is the normal top-level node; other roots may reflect errors in the hierarchy in Wiktionary. While not a root, the category all topics contains the subhierarchy of topical categories (e.g., food and drink, nature, sciences, etc.).

Nodes is a dictionary mapping lowercased category name to a dictionary containing data about the category. For each category, the following fields may be present:

  • name (always present): non-lowercased name of the category (note, however, that many categories are originally lowercase in the Wiktionary hierarchy)
  • desc: optional description of the category
  • clean_desc: optional cleaned description of the category, with wikitext formatting cleaned to human-readable text, except {{{langname}}} (and possibly other similar tags) are left intact.
  • children: optional list of child categories of the category
  • sort: optional list of sorts (types of subcategories?).

The categories are returned as they are in the original Wiktionary category data. Language-specific categories are generally not included. However, there is a category {{{langcat}}} that appears to contain a lot of the categories that have language-specific variants. Also, the category tree data does not contain language prefixes (the tree is defined in Wiktionary without prefixes and then replicated for each language).

Related packages

The wikitextprocessor is a generic module for extracting data from Wiktionary, Wikipedia, and other WikiMedia dump files. wiktextract is built using this module.

When using a version of wiktextract from github, please also setup wikitextprocessor so that they have rough parity. The pypi versions of these packages are usually out-of-date, and mixing a newer version with an older one will lead to bugs. These packages are being developed in parallel.

The wiktfinnish package can be used to interpret Finnish noun declinations and verb conjugations and for generating Finnish inflected word forms.

Publications

If you use Wiktextract or the extracted data in academic work, please cite the following article:

Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022.

Linking to https://kaikki.org or the relevant sub-pages would also be greatly appreciated.

Related tools

A few other tools also exist for parsing Wiktionaries. These include Dbnary, Wikiparse, and DKPro JWKTL.

Contributing and reporting bugs

Please report bugs and other issues on github. I also welcome suggestions for improvement.

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

License

Copyright (c) 2018-2020 Tatu Ylonen. This package is free for both commercial and non-commercial use. It is licensed under the MIT license. See the file LICENSE for details. (Certain files have different open source licenses)