Enhancing Arabic WordNet with the use of Princeton WordNet and a bilingual dictionary

This paper describes an heuristic-based approach to enhance existing WordNets with freely available bilingual resources. The approach has been applied to the Arabic WordNet using the AraMorph bilingual dictionary as bilingual resource, but its guidelines are quite general to be effectively applied to other languages. The English words extracted from the bilingual resource are checked against Princeton WordNet in order to quantify their coverage and to select only those words which share the same set of synsets. This strongly reduces the number of Arabic words of the pairs. These latter are then checked against the Arabic WordNet to make new words emerge and - possibly - add new synonyms.