MUHIT: A Multilingual Harmonized Dictionary

AbstractThis paper discusses a trial to build a multilingual harmonized dictionary that contains more than 40 languages, with special reference to Arabic which represents about 20% of the whole size of the dictionary. This dictionary is called MUHIT which is an interactive multilingual dictionary application. It is a web application that makes it easily accessible to all users. MUHIT is developed within the Universal Networking Language (UNL) framework by the UNDL Foundation, in cooperation with Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA). This application targets to serve specialists and non-specialists. It provides users with full linguistic description to each lexical item. This free application is useful to many NLP tasks such as multilingual translation and cross-language synonym search. This dictionary is built depending on WordNet and corpus based approaches, in a specially designed linguistic environment called UNLariam that is developed by the UNLD foundation. This dictionary is the first launched application by the UNLD foundation.