Representing Interlingual Meaning in Lexical Databases

TL;DR

This paper examines the limitations of current multilingual lexical databases in representing culturally-specific words and proposes an evaluation of their expressivity across diverse languages.

Contribution

It provides an assessment of existing lexical databases highlighting structural limitations affecting linguistic diversity representation.

Findings

English lexical meanings are represented more accurately.

Culturally-specific words are mapped approximately.

Structural limitations reduce expressivity for diverse languages.

Abstract

In today's multilingual lexical databases, the majority of the world's languages are under-represented. Beyond a mere issue of resource incompleteness, we show that existing lexical databases have structural limitations that result in a reduced expressivity on culturally-specific words and in mapping them across languages. In particular, the lexical meaning space of dominant languages, such as English, is represented more accurately while linguistically or culturally diverse languages are mapped in an approximate manner. Our paper assesses state-of-the-art multilingual lexical databases and evaluates their strengths and limitations with respect to their expressivity on lexical phenomena of linguistic diversity.