Providing Multilingual, Multimodal Answers to Lexical Database Queries

Language users are increasingly turning to electronic resources to address their lexical information needs, due to their convenience and their ability to simultaneously capture different facets of lexical knowledge in a single interface. In this paper, we discuss techniques to respond to a user’s lexical queries by providing multilingual and multimodal information, and facilitating navigating along different types of links. To this end, structured information from sources like WordNet, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, as well as Web services is linked and integrated to provide a multi-faceted yet consistent response to user queries. The meanings of words in many different languages are characterized by mapping them to appropriate WordNet sense identifiers and adding multilingual gloss descriptions as well as example sentences. Relationships are derived from WordNet and Wiktionary to allow users to discover semantically related words, etymologically related words, alternative spellings, as well as misspellings. Last but not least, images, audio recordings, and geographical maps extracted from Wikipedia and Wiktionary allow for a multimodal experience.