A Novel Approach to Creating Disambiguated Multilingual Dictionaries

Multilingual lexicons are needed in various applications, such as cross-lingual information retrieval, machine translation and some others. Often, these applications suffer from the ambiguity of dictionary items, especially when an intermediate natural language is involved in the process of the dictionary construction, since this language adds its ambiguity to the ambiguity of working languages. This paper aims at proposing a new method for producing multilingual dictionaries without the risk of introducing additional ambiguity. As a disambiguated intermediate language we use the so-called Universal Words. A set of more than 200,000 unambiguous Universal Words have been constructed automatically on the basis of the well-known English lexical database WordNet. This approach is being used for the construction of a five language-dictionary in the field of cultural heritage within the framework of the PATRILEX project sponsored by the Spanish Research Council.