From resources to applications. Designing the multilingual ISLE lexical entry

The ISLE Computational Lexicon Working Group is committed to the consensual definition of a standardized infrastructure to develop multilingual resources for HLT applications. In particular, the ISLE-CLWG pursues this goal by designing MILE (Multilingual ISLE Lexical Entry), a general schema for the encoding of multilingual lexical information. This has to be intended as a meta-entry, acting as a common representational layer for multilingual lexical resources. We present the general architecture and features of MILE, as well as the methodology adopted for its definition. In particular, we focus on two essential ingredients for the MILE specification: The selection of the types of lexical information most relevant to establish multilingual correspondences, and the specification of a data structure which will provide the formal backbone of the MILE as a general representation language to develop multilingual resources. The ISLE recommendations will also consist of a first repository of shared lexical objects, including main syntactic constructions, basic operations and conditions to establish multilingual links, macro-semantic objects, etc., for the encoding of lexical units at a higher level of abstraction, as a step in the direction of simplifying and improving the usability of the MILE recommendations. We are also developing the ISLE Lexicographic tool.