Disambiguating bilingual nominal entries against WordNet

Abstract

This paper explores the acquisition of conceptual knowledge from bilingual dictionaries (French/English, Spanish/English and English/Spanish) using a pre-existing broad coverage Lexical Knowledge Base (LKB) WordNet. Bilingual nominal entries are disambiguated agains WordNet, therefore linking the bilingual dictionaries to WordNet yielding a multilingual LKB (MLKB). The resulting MLKB has the same structure as WordNet, but some nodes are attached additionally to disambiguated vocabulary of other languages. Two different, complementary approaches are explored. In one of the approaches each entry of the dictionary is taken in turn, exploiting the information in the entry itself. The inferential capability for disambiguating the translation is given by Semantic Density over WordNet. In the other approach, the bilingual dictionary was merged with WordNet, exploiting mainly synonymy relations. Each of the approaches was used in a different dictionary. Both approaches attain high levels of precision on their own, showing that disambiguating bilingual nominal entries, and therefore linking bilingual dictionaries to WordNet is a feasible task.