Ten Years of BabelNet: A Survey

The intelligent manipulation of symbolic knowledge has been a long-sought goal of AI. However, when it comes to Natural Language Processing (NLP), symbols have to be mapped to words and phrases, which are not only ambiguous but also language-specific: multilinguality is indeed a desirable property for NLP systems, and one which enables the generalization of tasks where multiple languages need to be dealt with, without translating text. In this paper we survey BabelNet, a popular wide-coverage lexical-semantic knowledge resource obtained by merging heterogeneous sources into a unified semantic network that helps to scale tasks and applications to hundreds of languages. Over its ten years of existence, thanks to its promise to interconnect languages and resources in structured form, BabelNet has been employed in countless ways and directions. We first introduce the BabelNet model, its components and statistics, and then overview its successful use in a wide range of tasks in NLP as well as in other fields of AI.