Interlinguistic Divergences in Papillon Multilingual Dictionary

The Papillon project aims at building a multilingual pivot dictionary by voluntary contributors in collaboration on the Internet. The project started as a French-Japanese cooperation. The languages on development are English, French, German, Japanese, Lao, Malay, Thai and Vietnamese. We will discuss about how to solve the problems raised by the divergence of the predicates' argument structures in a multilingual context. If the entry (word sense) is a predicate (e.g.: "murder"), the semantic formula describing the entry will represent this predicate (e.g.: "murder of the individual X by the individual Y"). However, the number and the position of the arguments may vary a lot among languages. For example, there is a position shift in the arguments between the English predicate "X1 misses Y1" and its French equivalent "X2 manque à Y2" with X1=Y2 and Y1=X2. We propose a way to note this divergence in order to translate structures correctly.