Representing Multilingual Data as Linked Data: the Case of BabelNet 2.0

Recent years have witnessed a surge in the amount of semantic information published on the Web. Indeed, the Web of Data, a subset of the Semantic Web, has been increasing steadily in both volume and variety, transforming the Web into a ‘global database ’ in which resources are linked across sites. Linguistic fields – in a broad sense – have not been left behind, and we observe a similar trend with the growth of linguistic data collections on the so-called ‘Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) cloud’. While both Semantic Web and Natural Language Processing communities can obviously take advantage of this growing and distributed linguistic knowledge base, they are today faced with a new challenge, i.e., that of facilitating multilingual access to the Web of data. In this paper we present the publication of BabelNet 2.0, a wide-coverage multilingual encyclopedic dictionary and ontology, as Linked Data. The conversion made use of lemon, a lexicon model for ontologies particularly well-suited for this enterprise. The result is an interlinked multilingual (lexical) resource which can not only be accessed on the LOD, but also be used to enrich existing datasets with linguistic information, or to support the process of mapping datasets across languages. Keywords:Linguistic Linked Data, Multilingual Semantic Web, lexical-semantic resource, semantic network 1