BabelNet is an multilingual encyclopaedic dictionary, which features open data and was created by the Natural Language Processing (NLP) group at the Sapienza University of Rome. BabelNet is an ontology, defined using BabelNet as “a rigorous and exhaustive organization of some knowledge domain that is usually hierarchical and contains all the relevant entities and their relations”. BabelNet was developed by integrating other open-source databases, including, among others:
- WordNet
- Wikipedia
- OmegaWiki (link non-functional)
- Wiktionary
- WikiData
- GeoNames
- ImageNet
- VerbAtlas
- Open Multilingual WordNet (link non-functional)
BabelNet’s encylopaedic nature allows you to search for people and places, with images often included in the results:
The latest version, 5.3, was released in December 2023, and featured the addition of 80 new languages, bringing the total to 600. Using these languages, BabelNet offers a translation function, with translation into more than two languages at a time possible, and filtering by parts of speech available. Translated (and source language) results include all synonyms for the entered lemma, known as a BabelNet synset.
Because of its triple dictionary/encyclopaedia/translator function, BabelNet provides an excellent multilingual search service.
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