Toward an Architecture for the Global Wordnet Initiative

Enhancing the development of multilingual lexicons is of foremost importance for intercultural collaboration to take place, as multilingual lexicons are the cornerstone of several multilingual applications. However, the development and maintenance of large-scale, robust multilingual dictionaries is a tantalizing task. Moreover, Semantic Web's growing interest towards the availability of high-quality lexical resources and their multilingual interoperability, is focusing more and more attention on this topic. In this paper we present a tool, based on a web service architecture, enabling semi-automatic generation of bilingual lexicons through linking of distributed monolingual lexical resources. In addition to lexicon development, the architecture also allows enrichment of monolingual source lexicons through exploitation of the semantic information encoded in corresponding entries. In the paper we describe our case study applied to the Italian and Chinese wordnets, and we illustrate how the architecture can be extended to access distributed multilingual WordNets over the Internet, paving the way to exploitation in a cross-lingual framework of the wealth of information built over the last decade.