Reusability of dictionaries in the compilation of NLP lexicons

This paper discusses particular linguistic challenges in the task of reusing published dictionaries, conceived as structured sources of lexical information, in the compilation process of a machine-tractable thesaurus-like lexical database for Brazilian Portuguese. After delimiting the scope of the polysemous term thesaurus, the paper focuses on the improvement of the resulting object by a small team, in a form compatible with and inspired by WordNet guidelines, comments on the dictionary entries, addresses selected problems found in the process of extracting the relevant lexical information form the selected dictionaries, and provides some strategies to overcome them.

Wordnet.Br: An Exercise of Human Language Technology Research

This paper reports the ongoing project (since 2002) of developing a wordnet for Brazilian Portuguese (Wordnet.Br) from scratch. In particular, it describes the process of constructing the Wordnet.Br core database, which has 44,000 words organized in 18,500 synsets Accordingly, it briefly sketches the project overall methodology, its lexical resourses, the synset compilation process, and the Wordnet.Br editor, a GUI (graphical user interface) which aids the linguist in the compilation and maintenance of the Wordnet.Br. It concludes with the planned further work.