Cross-language Semantic Relations between English and Portuguese∗ Relaciones Semánticas entre los Idiomas Inglés y Portugués

This paper describes conceptual semantic relations obtained from OpenLogos resources converted into NooJ format. These relations were symbolically represented in the OpenLogos lexicon as a taxonomic scheme called semantico-syntactic abstraction language (SAL), used to generate hierarchical hyponymy and hypernymy relations. The paper also describes action-of, result-of, and synonymy relations between multiword units and single words, mostly where there is a morpho-syntactic and semantic relation between words of distinct parts-of-speech. The semantic relations were generated automatically, based on the linguistic information associated with each lexical entry in NooJ dictionaries. Local grammars were developed as a mechanism to read this linguistic information and generate the semantic relations, which have been used in paraphrasing and machine translation. Dictionaries and grammars can easily be adapted to distinct languages and are useful to various natural language processing monolingual or cross-language tasks.