Interlinking bilingual dictionaries on the Web

What is it about?

We describe the conversion of the Apertium family of bilingual dictionaries and lexicons into RDF (Resource Description Framework) and how their data have been made accessible on the Web as linked data. As a result, all the converted dictionaries (many of them covering under-resourced languages) are connected among them and can be easily traversed from one to another to obtain, for instance, translations between language pairs not originally connected in any of the original dictionaries.

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Why is it important?

We built a unified graph of multilingual information on the Web (Apertium RDF) from an initially disconnected family of bilingual dictionaries, linking it afterwards to a large online resource such as BabelNet. This was the first attempt of this nature in the Linguistic Linked Data literature. The followed methodology can serve to others to migrate similar resources into linked data. The resource itself can be exploited by other resources/systems as a source of translations expressed with Semantic Web technologies.