Aligning Multilingual Thesauri

The aligning and merging of ontologies with overlapping information are actual one of the most active domain of investigation in the Semantic Web community. Multilingual lexical ontologies thesauri are fundamental knowledge sources for most NLP projects addressing multilinguality. The alignment of multilingual lexical knowledge sources has various applications ranging from knowledge acquisition to semantic validation of interlingual equivalence of presumably the same meaning express in different languages. In this paper, we present a general method for aligning ontologies, which was used to align a conceptual thesaurus, lexicalized in 20 languages with a partial version of it lexicalized in Romanian. The objective of our work was to align the existing terms in the Romanian Eurovoc to the terms in the English Eurovoc and to automatically update the Romanian Eurovoc. The general formulation of the ontology alignment problem was set up along the lines established by Heterogeneity group of the KnowledgeWeb consortium, but the actual case study was motivated by the needs of a specific NLP project.