EuroWordNet: A Multilingual Database with Lexical Semantic Networks

WordNet, the on-line English thesaurus and lexical database developed at Princeton University by George Miller and his colleagues (Fellbaum 1998), has proved to be an extremely important resource used in much research in computational linguistics where lexical knowledge of English is required. The goal of the EuroWordNet project is to create similar wordnets for other languages of Europe. The initial four languages are Dutch (at the University of Amsterdam), Italian (CNR, Pisa), Spanish (Fundacion Universidad Empresa), and English (University of Sheffield, adapting the original WordNet); later Czech, Estonian, German, and French will be added. The results of the project will be publicly available. 1 Like the original Princeton WordNet, the new wordnets--that 's now a generic term--are hierarchies in which each node is a synset: a word sense, with which one or more synonymous words or phrases is associated. The synsets are connected by relations such as hyponymy, meronymy, and antonymy. However, some improvements have been made to the original design of WordNet. New relationships, including relationships across parts of speech, have been introduced. For example, the verb adorn and the noun adornment are related by XPOSd~EAR_SYNONYMY; hyponymy and hyperonymy 2 across parts of speech are also permitted. Semantic roles of verbs are marked; for example, the noun student is related to the verb teach by ROLE_PATIENT; the inverse relationship is called INVOLVEDd~ATIENT. Another new relationship, both within and across parts of speech, is causality, which may further be marked as intentional or nonfactive; for example, to redden CAUSES red; to search CAUSES (nonfactive, intentional) to find. Meronymy is much more fine-grained than in Princeton WordNet, with a number of new kinds of part-whole relationships. The most important new development, however, is multilinguality: the use of a common framework to build the individual wordnets and integrate them in a single database in which an inter-lingual-index (ILI) connects the synsets that are "equivalent" in the different languages. EuroWordNet thus becomes a multilingual lexicon and thesaurus that could be used in applications such as multilingual text retrieval and (rather basic) lexical transfer in machine translation. The project has sought to