Ontology-supported text classification based on cross-lingual word sense disambiguation

The paper reports on recent experiments in cross-lingual document processing (with a case study for Bulgarian-English-Romanian language pairs) and brings evidence on the benefits of using linguistic ontologies for achieving, with a high level of accuracy, difficult tasks in NLP such as word alignment, word sense disambiguation, document classification, cross-language information retrieval, etc. We provide brief descriptions of the parallel corpus we used, the multilingual lexical ontology which supports our research, the word alignment and word sense disambiguation systems we developed and a preliminary report on all ongoing development of a system for cross-lingual text-classification which takes advantage of these multilingual technologies. Unlike the keyword-based methods in document processing, the concept-based methods are supposed to better exploit the semantic information contained in a particular document and thus to provide more accurate results.