Multilingual Lexical Network from the Archives of the Digital Silk Road

We are describing the construction process of a specialized multilingual lexical resource dedicated for the archive of the Digital Silk Road DSR. The DSR project creates digital archives of cultural heritage along the historical Silk Road; more than 116 of basic references on Silk Road have been digitized and made available online. These books are written in various languages and attract people from different linguistic background, therefore, we are trying to build a multilingual repository for the terminology of the DSR to help its users, and increase the accessibility of these books. The construction of a terminological database using a classical approach is difficult and expensive. Instead, we are introducing specialized lexical resources that can be constructed by the community and its resources; we call it Multilingual Preterminological Graphs MPGs. We build such graphs by analyzing the access log files of the website of the Digital Silk Road. We aim at making this graph as a seed repository so multilingual volunteers can contribute. We have used the access log files of the DSR since its beginning in 2003, and obtained an initial graph of around 116,000 terms. As an application, We have used this graph to obtain a preterminological multilingual database that has a number of applications.