  We present the results of research with the goal of automatically creating a
multilingual thesaurus based on the freely available resources of Wikipedia and
WordNet. Our goal is to increase resources for natural language processing
tasks such as machine translation targeting the Japanese-Spanish language pair.
Given the scarcity of resources, we use existing English resources as a pivot
for creating a trilingual Japanese-Spanish-English thesaurus. Our approach
consists of extracting the translation tuples from Wikipedia, disambiguating
them by mapping them to WordNet word senses. We present results comparing two
methods of disambiguation, the first using VSM on Wikipedia article texts and
WordNet definitions, and the second using categorical information extracted
from Wikipedia, We find that mixing the two methods produces favorable results.
Using the proposed method, we have constructed a multilingual
Spanish-Japanese-English thesaurus consisting of 25,375 entries. The same
method can be applied to any pair of languages that are linked to English in
Wikipedia.
