Disambiguating bilingual nominal entries against WordNet

One reason why the lexical capabilities of NLP systems have remained weak is because of the labour intensive nature of encoding lexical entries for the lexicon. It has been estimated that the average time needed to construct manually a lexical entry for a Machine Translation system is about 30 minutes [Neff et al. 93]. The automatic acquisition of lexical knowledge is the main field of the research work presented here. In particular, this paper explores the acquisition of conceptual knowledge from bilingual dictionaries (French/English, Spanish/English and English/Spanish) using a pre-existing broad coverage Lexical Knowledge Base (LKB) WordNet [Miller 90].