Translation Equivalence and Synonymy: Preserving the Synsets in Cross-lingual Wordnets

The Princeton WordNet for English was founded on the synonymy relation, and multilingual wordnets are primarily developed by creating equivalent synsets in the respective languages. The process would often rely on translation equivalents obtained from existing bilingual dictionaries. This paper discusses some observations from the Chinese Open Wordnet, especially from the adjective subnet, to illuminate potential blind spots of the approach which may lead to the formation of non-synsets in the new wordnet. With cross-linguistic differences duly taken into account, alternative representations of cross-lingual lexical relations are proposed to better capture the language-specific properties. It is also suggested that such cross-lingual representation encompassing the cognitive as well as linguistic aspects of meaning is beneficial for a lexical resource to be used by both humans and computers.