Wiktionary and NLP: improving synonymy networks

Wiktionary, a satellite of the Wikipedia initiative, can be seen as a potential resource for Natural Language Processing. It requires however to be processed before being used efficiently as an NLP resource. After describing the relevant aspects of Wiktionary for our purposes, we focus on its structural properties. Then, we describe how we extracted synonymy networks from this resource. We provide an in-depth study of these synonymy networks and compare them to those extracted from traditional resources. Finally, we describe two methods for semi-automatically improving this network by adding missing relations: (i) using a kind of semantic proximity measure; (ii) using translation relations of Wiktionary itself.