The ISLE project is a continuation of the long standing EAGLES initiative, carried out under the Human Language Technology (HLT) programme in collaboration between American and European groups in the framework of the EU-US International Research Co-operation, supported by NSF and EC. In this paper we concentrate on the current position of the ISLE Computational Lexicon Working Group (CLWG), whose activities aim at defining a general schema for a multilingual lexical entry (MILE), as the basis for a standard framework for multilingual computational lexicons. The needs and features of existing Machine Translation systems provide the main reference points for the process of consensual definition of the MILE. The overall structure of the MILE will be illustrated with particular attention to some of the issues raised for multilingual lexicons by the need of expressing complex transfer conditions among translation equivalents

The paper aims at providing an overview of the situation of Language Resources (LR) in Europe, in particular as emerging from a few European projects regarding the construction of large-scale harmonised resources to be used for many applicative purpose, also of multilingual nature. An important research aspect of the projects is given by the very fact that the large enterprise described is, at our knowledge, the first attempt at developing wide-coverage lexicons for so many languages (12 European languages), with a harmonised common model, and with encoding of structured "semantic types" and semantic (subcategorisation) frames on a large scale. Reaching a common agreed model grounded on sound theoretical approaches within a very large consortium is in itself a challenging task. The actual lexicons will then provide a framework for testing and evaluating the maturity of the current state-of-the-art in lexical semantics grounded on, and connected to. a syntactic foundation. Another research aspect is provided by the recognition of the necessity of accompanying these "static" lexicons with dynamic means of acquiring lexical information from large corpora. This is one of the challenging research aspects of a global strategy for building a large and useful multilingual LR infrastructure.