Multilingual linguistic resources: from monolingual lexicons to bilingual interrelated lexicons

This paper describes a procedure to convert the PAROLE-SIMPLE monolingual lexicons into bilingual interrelated lexicons where each word sense of a given language is linked to the pertinent sense of the right words in one or more target lexicons. Nowadays, SIMPLE lexicons are monolingual although the ultimate goal of these harmonised monolingual lexicons is to build multilingual lexical resources. For achieving this goal it is necessary to automatise the linking among the different senses of the different monolingual lexicons, as the production of such multilingual relations by hand will be, as all tasks related with the development of linguistic resources, unaffordable in terms of human resources and time spent. The system we describe in this paper takes advantage of the SIMPLE model and the SIMPLE based lexicons so that, in the best case, it can find fully automatically the relevant sense-to-sense correspondences for determining the translational equivalence of two words in two different languages and, in the worst case, it will be able to narrow the set of admissible links between words and relevant senses. This paper also explores to what extent semantic encoding in already existing computational lexicons such as SIMPLE can help in overcoming the problems arisen when using monolingual meaning descriptions for bilingual links and aims to set the basis for defining a model for adding a bilingual layer to the SIMPLE model. This bilingual layer based on a bilingual relation model will be the basis indeed for defining the multilingual language resource we want PAROLE-SIMPLE lexicons to become