Representing the Translation Relation in a Bilingual Wordnet

This paper describes representing translations in the Finnish wordnet, FinnWordNet (FiWN), and constructing the FiWN database. FiWN was created by translating all the word senses of the Princeton WordNet (PWN) into Finnish and by joining the translations with the semantic and lexical relations of PWN extracted into a relational (database) format. The approach naturally resulted in a translation relation between PWN and FiWN. Unlike in many other multilingual wordnets, the translation relation in FiWN is primarily at the level of word senses, which allows more precise translation correspondences than at the sense (synset) level. It can easily be projected into a synset-level translation relation, used for linking with other wordnets via Core WordNet. Synset-level translations are also used as a default in the absence of word sense translations. The FiWN data in the relational database can be converted to other formats. In the PWN database format, translations are attached to source-language words, allowing the implementation of a Web search interface also working as a bilingual dictionary. Another representation encodes the translation relation as a finite-state transducer.