A Multilingual Approach to Building Slovene Wordnet

The paper presents an experiment in which synsets for Slovene wordnet were induced automatically from several multilingual resources. Our research is based on the assumption that translations are a plausible source of semantically relevant information. More specifically, we argue that the translational relation on the one hand reduces ambiguity of a source word and on the other conveys semantic relatedness of a set of target words. We tried to identify sense distinctions of polysemous words and obtain sets of synonyms by first extracting multilingual lexicons from a word-aligned JRC-Acquis parallel corpus and then comparing them with the already existing wordnets in various languages. At this stage, lexicon entries were disambiguated and appropriate synset ids were assigned to their Slovene translation equivalents. Finally, the Slovene lexicon entries sharing the same assigned synset id were organized into a synset.