Eurowordnet: A Multilingual Database of Autonomous and Language-Specific Wordnets Connected via an Inter-Lingualindex

This paper describes the multilingual design of the EuroWordNet database. The EuroWordNet database stores wordnets as autonomous language -specific structures that are interconnected via an Inter-Lingual-Index (ILI). In this paper, we discuss the possibilities to create mappings from each wordnet to the central ILI and how the ILI itself can be adapted to provide more overlap across the wordnets. We will argue that the ILI can be condensed to a more universal index of meaning, while the wordnets can still encode any fine-grained lexicalizations for each language.