Development of the multilingual semantic annotation system

Abstract

This paper reports on our research to generate multilingual semantic lexical resources and develop multilingual semantic annotation software, which assigns each word in running text to a semantic category based on a lexical semantic classification scheme. Such tools have an important role in developing intelligent multilingual NLP, text mining and ICT systems. In this work, we aim to extend an existing English semantic annotation tool to cover a range of languages, namely Italian, Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese, by bootstrapping new semantic lexical resources via automatically translating existing English semantic lexicons into these languages. We used a set of bilingual dictionaries and word lists for this purpose. In our experiment, with minor manual improvement of the automatically generated semantic lexicons, the prototype tools based on the new lexicons achieved an average lexical coverage of 79.86% and an average annotation precision of 71.42% (if only precise annotations are considered) or 84.64% (if partially correct annotations are included) on the three languages. Our experiment demonstrates that it is feasible to rapidly develop prototype semantic annotation tools for new languages by automatically bootstrapping new semantic lexicons based on existing ones.