Introduction to the special issue: On wordnets and relations

Since its inception a quarter century ago, Princeton WordNet [PWN] (Miller 1995; Fellbaum 1998) has had a profound influence on research and applications in lexical semantics, computational linguistics and natural language processing. The numerous uses of this lexical resource have motivated the building of wordnets in several dozen languages, including even a ‘‘dead’’ language, Latin. This special issue looks at certain aspects of wordnet construction and organisation. There are diverse methods of wordnet construction, relying on different underlying theories. The most common method is to translate PWN, using corpora and bilingual or multilingual dictionaries to assist in transferring the structure from the source to the target wordnet. Translation, however, does not do justice to the many lexical, semantic and typological cross-lingual differences. Non-trivial