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<Paper uid="W03-1401">
  <Title>Metonymy as a Cross-lingual Phenomenon</Title>
  <Section position="8" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
8. Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We have described a methodology for systematically and automatically investigating the question of whether or not certain kinds of metonymic relationships hold across languages. We used EuroWordNet as the test bed for this investigation, although the technique is not limited to EuroWordNet and will apply to any multilingual resource that captures hypernymic relationships and has some notion of correspondences among languages. Our manual evaluation shows regular polysemy patterns to be valid across the three languages examined, and indicates that regular polysemy has a certain level of universality. Also, the results of the experiment indicate a potential for enhancing the semantic compatibility and consistency of wordnets. Wordnets are automatically extendable on the basis of regular polysemic information available from other wordnets. In our small experiment 50% of the Dutch and Spanish words that do not display a WordNet-derived regular polysemic pattern were successfully semantically enriched with this pattern. Future work will involve further experimentation.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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