On the Utility of Automatically Generated WordNets

Lexical resources modelled after the original Princeton WordNet are being compiled for a considerable number of languages, however most have yet to reach a comparable level of coverage. In this paper, we show that automatically built WordNets, created from an existing WordNet in conjunction with translation dictionaries, are a suitable alternative for many applications, despite the errors introduced by the automatic building procedure. Apart from analysing the resources directly, we conducted tests on semantic relatedness assessment and cross-lingual text classification with very promising results.