BabelNet: a Wide-Coverage Multilingual Dictionary

BabelNet is the dictionary of the future, it provides the meanings of words with illustrations - and will soon come with videos and animation. It includes entities as well as words, so a search for apple produces results that contain a picture of fruit as well as the famous corporate logo. 

His creator, RobertoNavigli, a computer scientist and associate professor at Sapienza University in Rome, calls it BabelNet after the biblical tower and the technology he believes can bridge the world’s languages. 

“The idea is to put a lot of resources together, all the resources that people usually access separately,” he says in an interview published on Times. BabelNet, with 14 million entries and information in 271 languages, is the largest multilingual encyclopedic dictionary and semantic network created by means of the integration of the largest multilingual Web encyclopedia - i.e., Wikipedia - with the most popular computational lexicon of English - i.e., WordNet, and other lexical resources such as Wiktionary, OmegaWiki, Wikidata, Open Multilingual WordNet, Wikiquote, VerbNet, Microsoft Terminology, GeoNames, WoNeF, ImageNet, ItalWordNet, Open Dutch WordNet and FrameNet.

Version 3.7 comes with the following new features:

1. New resource integrated: FrameNet (lexical units)
2. More than 2500 Babel synsets identified as key concepts
3. Mappings with several versions of WordNet now integrated (from 1.6 to 3.0)
4. More than 2.6 million Babel synsets labeled with domains (was 1,558,806 in v3.6)
5. Babelnet is, and always will be, free for research purposes, including download. Babelscape, a Sapienza startup company, is BabelNet's commercial support arm, thanks to which the project will be continued and improved over time.

This is how concepts are displayed, one of the most beautiful features of Babelnet

Sources:

Redefining the Modern Dictionary, Time.com

BabelNet