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<Paper uid="W97-0801">
  <Title>Multilingual design of EuroWordNet Piek Vossen, University of Amsterdam</Title>
  <Section position="5" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
5. Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The multilingual EuroWordNet database thus consists of separate language-internal modules, separate language-external modules and an inter-lingual module which has the following advantages: * it will be possible to use the database for multilingual retrieval.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> * the different wordnets can be compared and checked cross-linguistically which will make them more compatible.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> * language-dependent differences can be maintained in the individual wordnets.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> * language-independent information such as the domain-knowledge, the analytic top-concepts and information on instances can be stored only once and can be made available to all the language-specific modules via the inter-lingual relations. the database can be tailored to a user's needs by modifying the top-concepts, the domain labels or instances, (e.g. by adding semantic features) without having to know the separate languages or to access the language-specific wordnets.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> At the same time, the fact that the Inter-Lingual-Index or ILI is unstructured has the following major advantages: null * complex multilingual relations only have to be considered site by site and there will be no need to communicate about concepts and relations from a many to many perspective.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> * future extensions of the database can take place without re-discussing the ILI structure. The ILl can then be seen as a fund of concepts which can be used in any way to establish a relation to the other wordnets.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> The structure of the database and the strategies for its implementation have been chosen out of pragmatic considerations. The architecture will allow maximum efficiency for simultaneous multilingual implementation in more than one site, and will offer an empirical view on the problems related to the creation of an inter-lingua by aligning the wordnets, thus revealing mismatches between 'equivalent' semantic configurations. These mismatches may be due to: * a mistake in the eqmvalence-relations (interlingual links) * a mistake in the Language Internal Relations * a language-specific difference in lexicalization By using the cross language comparison and the tools described in section 4 a particular series of mismatches can provide criteria for selecting that part of the semantic network which needs inspection, and may give clues on how to unify diverging semantic configurations. This will constitute the first step towards generating an interlingua on the basis of a set of aligned language-specific semantic networks.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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