In this paper we outline the design and present a sample of the REBECA bilingual lexical-conceptual database constructed by linking two monolingual lexical resources in which a set of lexicalized concepts of the North-American English database, the Princeton WordNet (WN.Pr) synsets, is aligned with its corresponding set of lexicalized concepts of the Brazilian Portuguese database, the Brazilian Portuguese WordNet synsets under construction, by means of the MultiNet-based interlingual schema, the concepts of which are the ones represented by the Princeton WordNet synsets. Implemented in the Protégé-OWL editor, the alignment of the two databases illustrates how wordnets can be turned into ontolexicons. At the current stage of development, the “wheeled-vehicle” conceptual domain was modeled to develop and to test REBECA’s design and contents, respectively. The collection of 205 ontological concepts worked out, i.e. REBECA´s alignment indexes, is exemplified in the “wheeled- vehicle” conceptual domain, e.g. [CAR], [RAILCAR], etc., and it was selected in the WN.Pr database, version 2.0. Future work includes the population of the database with more lexical data and other conceptual domains so that the intricacies of adding more concepts and devising the spreading or pruning the relationships between them can be properly evaluated.

Princeton WordNet (WN.Pr) lexical database has motivated efficient compilations of bulky relational lexicons since its inception in the 1980´s. The EuroWordNet project, the first multilingual initiative built upon WN.Pr, opened up ways of building individual wordnets, and inter-relating them by means of the so-called Inter-Lingual-Index, an unstructured list of the WN.Pr synsets. Other important initiative, relying on a slightly different method of building multilingual wordnets, is the MultiWordNet project, where the key strategy is building language specific wordnets keeping as much as possible of the semantic relations available in the WN.Pr. This paper, in particular, stresses that the additional advantage of using WN.Pr lexical database as a resource for building wordnets for other languages is to explore possibilities of implementing an automatic procedure to map the WN.Pr conceptual relations as hyponymy, co-hyponymy, troponymy, meronymy, cause, and entailment onto the lexical database of the wordnet under construction, a viable possibility, for those are language-independent relations that hold between lexicalized concepts, not between lexical units. Accordingly, combining methods from both initiatives, this paper presents the ongoing implementation of the WN.Br lexical database and the aforementioned automation procedure illustrated with a sample of the automatic encoding of the hyponymy and co-hyponymy relations.