Predicting Translation Equivalents in Linked WordNets

We present an algorithm for predicting translation equivalents between two languages, based on the corresponding WordNets. The assumption is that all synsets of one of the languages are linked to the corresponding synsets in the other language. In theory, given the exact sense of a word in a context it must be possible to translate it as any of the words in the linked synset. In practice, however, this does not work well since automatic and accurate sense disambiguation is difficult. Instead it is possible to define a more robust translation relation between the lexemes of the two languages. As far as we know the Finnish WordNet is the only one that includes that relation. Our algorithm can be used to predict the relation for other languages as well. This is useful for instance in hybrid machine translation systems which are usually more dependent on high-quality translation dictionaries.