Coping with Lexical Gaps when Building Aligned Multilingual Wordnets

In this paper we present a methodology for automatically classifying the translation equivalents of a machine readable bilingual dictionary in three main groups: lexical units, lexical gaps (that is cases when a lexical concept of a language does not have a correspondent in the other language) and translation equivalents that need to be manually classified as lexical units or lexical gaps. This preventive classification reduces the manual work necessary to cope with lexical gaps in the construction of aligned multilingual wordnets.