Introduction to EuroWordNet

This paper gives a global introduction to the aims and objectives of the EuroWordNet project, and it provides a general framework for the other papers in this volume. EuroWordNet is an EC project that develops a multilingual database with wordnets in several European languages, structured along the same lines as the Princeton WordNet. Each wordnet represents an autonomous structure of language-specific lexicalizations, which are interconnected via an Inter-Lingual-Index. The wordnets are built at different sites from existing resources, starting from a shared level of basic concepts and extended top-down. The results will be publicly available and will be tested in cross-language information retrieval applications.