Multilingual lexicons for related languages

The great increase in work on the lexicon by computational and theoretical linguists throughout the s has concerned itself almost exclusively with monolingual lexicons Meanwhile applied work on multilingual lexicons mostly for machine translation MT has employed monolingual lexicons linked only at the level of semantics In this paper we argue that the traditional MT lexicon architecture while arguably adequate for unrelated languages makes it impossible to capture important generalisations about related languages These generalisations if captured can help to produce more robust multilingual natural language processing NLP systems for such languages We discuss the types of relation we nd in Dutch English and German and describe a hierarchical lexicon structure which permits sharing of information across any level of lexical representation illustrating it with examples from English and German