Developing Multilingual Web-scale Language Technologies

Project partner of MEANING which was concerned with automatically collecting and analysing language data from the WWW on a large scale, and building more comprehensive multilingual lexical knowledge bases to support improved word sense disambiguation (WSD). MEANING used state of the art NLP techniques pioneered by the consortium to enhance EuroWordNet with mainly language-independent lexico-semantic (concept) information. We used a combination of Machine Learning and Knowledge-Based techniques in order to enrich the structure of the wordnets in different domains (subsets of the web) in five European languages: English, Italian, Spanish, Catalan and Basque. The core technology used by MEANING included tools to perform language identification, morphological analysis, part-of-speech tagging, named-entity recognition and classification, sentence boundary detection, shallow parsing and text categorization.