Translating Lexical Semantic Relations: The First Step Towards Multilingual Wordnets

* An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Third Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop at Academia Sinica in May 2002. We are indebted to the participants as well as colleagues at CKIP for their comments. We would also like to thank the SemaNet 2002 reviewers for their helpful comments. It is our own responsibilities that, due to the short revision time, we were not able to incorporate all their suggestions, especially comparative studies with some relative GWA papers. We are also responsible for all remaining errors Abstract Establishing correspondences between wordnets of different languages is essential to both multilingual knowledge processing and for bootstrapping wordnets of low-density languages. We claim that such correspondences must be based on lexical semantic relations, rather than top ontology or word translations. In particular, we define a translation equivalence relation as a bilingual lexical semantic relation. Such relations can then be part of a logical entailment predicting whether source language semantic relations will hold in a target language or not. Our claim is tested with a study of 210 Chinese lexical lemmas and their possible semantic relations links bootstrapped from the Princeton WordNet. The results show that lexical semantic relation translations are indeed highly precise when they are logically inferable.