Based on those two findings, we proposed the idea of a robot capable of pulling cross-lingual information from those resources and presenting in a way that is better suited for the needs of translators. Sounds like you may have just done this!
Well... I hope I did :) The aim was to automatically generate a multilingual thesaurus, which is surely a good tool for translators. However, the quality of the results are not what a translator would expect from a traditional lexicon or thesaurus. The data is probably most useful directly when used in the context of information retrieval and language processing, that is, as a basis for computers to link text to conceptual world knowledge ("common sense"). I hope however that the data I generate could be usefull to translators anyway, as an addition or extension to traditional, manually maintained dictionaries and thesauri. One point that would veryx much interest me is to try to use my work aqs a basis of building a bridge between Wikipedia and OmegaWiki.
One of my goals in the next year or two is to participate in the creation of large, open, wiki-like terminology databases for translators. We call this concept a WikiTerm.
Having observed and interviewed a dozen translators doing their work, I can say without hesitation that they don't worry too much about upstream quality control in terminology database. Most of the quality control is done downstream, by the translator himself. Translators naturally develop a sort of 6th sense that allows them to very rapidly sift through a list of term equivalents, and decide which one (if any) is most appropriate for their current need.
One of the conclusions we came to in our paper was that, while OmegaWiki was currently wiki resource whose coverage of typical translation difficulties was lowest, its user interface was closest to what translators need. And we suggested that a good way to get to a WikiTerm would be to do exactly what you propose, i.e. extract write a robot that can extract cross-lingual information from Wikipedia and Wiktionary, and pour that into OmegaWiki.
So, let's talk! Do you have contacts at OmegaWiki? If not, I can put you in touch with them.
Is there a web interface to this multilingual resource that I could
try?
Sadly, no. I was planning one and started to implement it, but there was no time to get it up and running. Maybe there will be such an interface in the future. But I really see the place of my code more as a backend -- a good interface to that data may in fact be OmegaWiki, if we find a way to integrate it nicely. But I do feel the urge to provide a simple query interface to my data for testing, so maybe it'll still happen :)
Are you planning to do more work on this, or are you moving on to other things?
Have a good weekend.
Alain Désilets