Building a free French wordnet from multilingual resources

International audienceThis paper describes automatic construction a freely-available wordnet for French (WOLF) based on Princeton WordNet (PWN) by using various multilingual resources. Polysemous words were dealt with an approach in which a parallel corpus for five languages was word-aligned and the extracted multilingual lexicon was disambiguated with the existing wordnets for these languages. On the other hand, a bilingual approach sufficed to acquire equivalents for monosemous words. Bilingual lexicons were extracted from Wikipedia and thesauri. The results obtained from each resource were merged and ranked according to the number of resources yielding the same literal. Automatic evaluation of the merged wordnet was performed with the French WordNet (FREWN). Manual evaluation was also carried out on a sample of the generated synsets. Precision shows that the presented approach has proved to be very promising and applications to use the created wordnet are already intended