Cross-lingual Portability of Semantic Relations: Bootstrapping Chinese WordNet with English WordNet Relations *

Establishing correspondences between wordnets of different languages is essential to multilingual knowledge processing. We claim that such correspondences must be based on lexical semantic relations, rather than top ontology or word translations. In particular, we define a translation equivalence relation as a bilingual lexical semantic relation. Such relations can then be part of the logical entailment predicting whether source language semantic relations will hold in target language or not. Our claim is tested with a study on 210 Chinese lexical lemmas and their possible semantic-relation links bootstrapped from the Princeton WordNet. The results show that lexical semantic-relation translations are indeed highly precise when they are logically inferable. The study has positive implications for bootstrapping of language wordnets with insufficient monolingual lexical resources.