  In today's multilingual lexical databases, the majority of the world's
languages are under-represented. Beyond a mere issue of resource
incompleteness, we show that existing lexical databases have structural
limitations that result in a reduced expressivity on culturally-specific words
and in mapping them across languages. In particular, the lexical meaning space
of dominant languages, such as English, is represented more accurately while
linguistically or culturally diverse languages are mapped in an approximate
manner. Our paper assesses state-of-the-art multilingual lexical databases and
evaluates their strengths and limitations with respect to their expressivity on
lexical phenomena of linguistic diversity.
