SALDO: a touch of yin to WordNet’s yang

The English-language Princeton WordNet (PWN) and some wordnets for other languages have been extensively used as lexical–semantic knowledge sources in language technology applications, due to their free availability and their size. The ubiquitousness of PWN-type wordnets tends to overshadow the fact that they represent one out of many possible choices for structuring a lexical–semantic resource, and it could be enlightening to look at a differently structured resource both from the point of view of theoretical–methodological considerations and from the point of view of practical text processing requirements. The resource described here—SALDO—is such a lexical–semantic resource, intended primarily for use in language technology applications, and offering an alternative organization to PWN-style wordnets. We present our work on SALDO, compare it with PWN, and discuss some implications of the differences. We also describe an integrated infrastructure for computational lexical resources where SALDO forms the central component.