WHERE THE JOURNEY IS HEADED: COLLABORATIVELY CONSTRUCTED MULTILINGUAL WIKI-BASED RESOURCES

Abstract

Multilingual lexical-semantic resources play an important role in computational linguistics, e.g. in cross-lingual information retrieval or machine translation. However, multilingual resources with sufficient quality and coverage are rare, as the effort of manually constructing such a resource is substantial. In recent years, the emergence of Web 2.0 has opened new possibilities for handling the effort of constructing large scale lexical-semantic resources. We identified Wiktionary and OmegaWiki as two important multilingual initiatives where a community of users («crowd») collaboratively edits and refines the lexical information. We argue that collaborative construction is a promising approach to cope with the enormous effort of building such resources. It seems especially appropriate in the multilingual domain as users from all languages and cultures can easily contribute. However, despite their advantages such as open access and coverage of multiple languages, these resources have hardly been systematically investigated until now. Therefore, the goal of our contribution is two-fold: First, we focus on two promising multilingual resources containing lexical-semantic information. To this end, we analyze the way they emerged and characterize the resulting content. Second, we propose how a collaboratively constructed multilingual resource should be designed in order to be maximally useful for text analysis.