Design and Development of a Multilingual Balkan WordNet

Project partner of Balkanet which aimed at the development of a multilingual lexical database comprising of individual WordNets for the Balkan languages. The most ambitious feature of the BalkaNet was its attempt to represent semantic relations between words in each Balkan language and link them together in order to develop an on line multilingual semantic network. The main objective was the development of each’s languages WordNet from available resources covering the general vocabulary of each language. Semantic relations will be classified in the independent WordNets according to a shared ontology. Then, all individual WordNets were organized into a common database providing linking across them. Each of the WordNets were structured along the same lines as the EuroWordNet through a WordNet Management System. This project was an excellent opportunity to explore the less studied Balkan languages and combine and compare them cross-linguistically.