Multilinguality is a key feature of today’s Web, and it is this feature that we leverage and exploit
in our research work at the Sapienza University of Rome’s Linguistic Computing Laboratory, which I am
going to overview and showcase in this talk.
I will start by presenting BabelNet 2.5 (
http://babelnet.org), a very large multilingual encyclopedic
dictionary and semantic network, which covers 50 languages and provides both lexicographic and
encyclopedic knowledge for all the open-class parts of speech, thanks to the seamless integration of
WordNet, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, OmegaWiki, Wikidata and the Open Multilingual WordNet.
Next, I will present Babelfy (
http://babelfy.org), a unified approach that leverages BabelNet to
perform word sense disambiguation and entity linking in arbitrary languages, with performance on both
tasks on a par with, or surpassing, those of task-specific state-of-the-art supervised systems.
In the third part of the talk I will present two approaches to large-scale knowledge acquisition and
validation: video games with a purpose, a novel, powerful paradigm for the large scale acquisition
and validation of knowledge and data, and WiBi (
http://wibitaxonomy.org), our approach to the
construction of a Wikipedia bitaxonomy, that is, the largest and most accurate currently available
taxonomy of Wikipedia pages and a taxonomy of categories, aligned to each other.