Synonymy and translational equivalence are the relations of sameness of meaning within and across languages. As the principal relations in wordnets and multi-wordnets, they are vital to computational lexical semantics, yet the field suffers from the absence of a common formal framework to define their properties and relationship. This paper proposes a unifying treatment of these two relations, which is validated by experiments on existing resources. In our view, synonymy and translational equivalence are simply different types of semantic identity. The theory establishes a solid foundation for critically re-evaluating prior work in cross-lingual semantics, and facilitating the creation, verification, and amelioration of lexical resources.
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