Abstract Bilingual word embeddings represent words of two languages in the same space, and allow to transfer knowledge from one language to the other without machine translation. The main approach is to train monolingual embeddings first and then map them using bilingual dictionaries. In this work, we present a novel method to learn bilingual embeddings based on multilingual knowledge bases (KB) such as WordNet. Our method extracts bilingual information from multilingual wordnets via random walks and learns a joint embedding space in one go. We further reinforce cross-lingual equivalence adding bilingual constraints in the loss function of the popular Skip-gram model. Our experiments on twelve cross-lingual word similarity and relatedness datasets in six language pairs covering four languages show that: 1) our method outperforms the state-of-the-art mapping method using dictionaries; 2) multilingual wordnets on their own improve over text-based systems in similarity datasets; 3) the combination of wordnet-generated information and text is key for good results. Our method can be applied to richer KBs like DBpedia or BabelNet, and can be easily extended to multilingual embeddings. All our software and resources are open source.
Owing to the need for a deep understanding of linguistic items, semantic representation is considered to be one of the fundamental components of several applications in Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence. As a result, semantic representation has been one of the prominent research areas in lexical semantics over the past decades. However, due mainly to the lack of large sense-annotated corpora, most existing representation techniques are limited to the lexical level and thus cannot be effectively applied to individual word senses. In this paper we put forward a novel multilingual vector representation, called Nasari, which not only enables accurate representation of word senses in different languages, but it also provides two main advantages over existing approaches: (1) high coverage, including both concepts and named entities, (2) comparability across languages and linguistic levels (i.e., words, senses and concepts), thanks to the representation of linguistic items in a single unified semantic space and in a joint embedded space, respectively. Moreover, our representations are flexible, can be applied to multiple applications and are freely available at http: lcl.uniroma1.it nasari . As evaluation benchmark, we opted for four different tasks, namely, word similarity, sense clustering, domain labeling, and Word Sense Disambiguation, for each of which we report state-of-the-art performance on several standard datasets across different languages. We present an automatic approach to the construction of BabelNet, a very large, wide-coverage multilingual semantic network. Key to our approach is the integration of lexicographic and encyclopedic knowledge from WordNet and Wikipedia. In addition, Machine Translation is applied to enrich the resource with lexical information for all languages. We first conduct in vitro experiments on new and existing gold-standard datasets to show the high quality and coverage of BabelNet. We then show that our lexical resource can be used successfully to perform both monolingual and cross-lingual Word Sense Disambiguation: thanks to its wide lexical coverage and novel semantic relations, we are able to achieve state-of the-art results on three different SemEval evaluation tasks.