The nature of cross-lingual lexical semantic relations: A preliminary study based on English-Chinese translation equivalents

In this paper, we propose a new approach to comparative lexical semantics. In particular, a wordnet-like framework is adopted to study the nature of cross-lingual lexical semantic relations. The synsets of an existing monolingual wordnet are often aligned with their translation equivalents in a target languages in order to bootstrap a bilingual wordnet. Previous studies adopting this approach include the Spanish WordNet (SpWN, Atserias et al., 1997) and MultiWordNet (MWN, Pianta, et al., 2002). Such studies brought to attention the importance of cross-lingual lexical semantic relations between two translation equivalents. In this paper, we examine and analyze the contrast and the cross-lingual semantic relations between the English WN synsets, and their Chinese translation equivalents. Generalizations are made based on the distribution of the part-ofspeech, semantic relations and concepts in terms of SUMO ontology. Our account sheds the first light towards the nature of conceptual basis for non-synonymous translation, as well as for bilingual wordnet-mapping.