A Semantic Description Language for Multilingual NLP

A Semantic Description Language (SDL) for multilingual NLP is a multi-layered description language assigned to concepts, in order to ful ll a set of di erent functions. The most traditional function is to describe restrictions in selection and co-ocurrence in a motivated and consistent way. A second function of SDLs is to de ne relations between terms of one or more languages for all kind of (multilingual) NLP such as indexing, retrieval, text generation and Machine Translation. A third function has only recently been mentioned, i.e. SDL as a guideline according to which lexicon development has to take place. Within this paper, I present a strategy to employ an SDL within multilingual dictionaries, which in a systematic, powerful and e cient way ful lls the above requirements.