EuroWordNet: a multilingual database for information retrieval

The aim of the EuroWordNet-project is the development of a database with wordnets for English, Spanish, Dutch and Italian, similar to the Princeton WordNet1.5, which contains basic semantic relations between words in English. The Dutch, Italian and Spanish wordnets will be linked to the WordNet1.5 using equivalence relations. The resulting multilingual database can directly be used in (multi-lingual) information retrieval. In this paper the basic characteristics of this database are described as far as relevant to this purpose. Paper presented at the DELOS workshop on Cross-language Information Retrieval, March 5-7, 1997, Zurich. 1. Introduction EuroWordNet 1 aims to build a multilingual database consisting of wordnets in several European languages (English, Dutch, Italian, and Spanish). Each language-specific wordnet is structured along the same lines as WordNet (Miller et al, 1990), i.e. synonyms are grouped in synsets, which in their turn are related by means of basic semantic ..