This work analyzes the conceptual metaphors of depression in a corpus of 23 blogs written in Catalan by people suffering major depressive disorder. Its main aim was comparative, in order to check whether metaphors detected in previous studies were also used in a new genre and a new language. Their use was confirmed, thus reinforcing the metaphors' relevance and their conceptual (i.e. non language-dependent) nature. Furthermore, the study broadens the scope of the conceptualization of life with depression with a set of metaphors not attested before, mostly related to social, communicative and medical factors. The results suggest that the containment and constraint that characterize a crucial part of the metaphorical discourse of depression are not only imposed by the disorder itself, but also by contextual factors (such as stigma, lack of communication, or the medical practice perceived as a repressive power) that can have a significant impact on the lives people with depression lead. They also suggest that the very nature of blogging as a genre allows these people to provide more accurate depictions of their condition, thus providing a more comprehensive account of metaphors of life with depression and potentially empowering them.

This paper presents a linguistic analysis of a corpus of messages written in Catalan and Spanish, which come from several informal newsgroups on the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia; henceforth, UOC) Virtual Campus. The surrounding environment is one of extensive bilingualism and contact between Spanish and Catalan. The study was carried out as part of the INTERLINGUA project conducted by the UOC's Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3). Its main goal is to ascertain the linguistic characteristics of the e‐mail register in the newsgroups in order to assess their implications for the creation of an online machine translation environment. The results shed empirical light on the relevance of characteristics of the e‐mail register, the impact of language contact and interference, and their implications for the use of machine translation for CMC data in order to facilitate cross‐linguistic communication on the Internet.

This paper explores the automatic construction of a multilingual Lexical Knowledge Base from preexisting lexical resources. First, a set of automatic and complementary techniques for linking Spanish words collected from monolingual and bilingual MRDs to English WordNet synsets are described. Second, we show how resulting data provided by each method is then combined to produce a preliminary version of a Spanish WordNet with an accuracy over 85%. The application of these combinations results on an increment of the extracted connexions of a 40% without losing accuracy. Both coarsegrained (class level) and fine-grained (synset assignment level) confidence ratios are used and evaluated. Finally, the results for the whole process are presented. *

Abstract. In this paper we present a methodology for WordNet construction based on the exploitation of parallel corpora with semantic annotation of the English source text. We are using this methodology for the enlargement of the Spanish and Catalan versions of WordNet 3.0, but the methodology can also be used for other languages. As big parallel corpora with semantic annotation are not usually available, we explore two strategies to overcome this problem: to use monolingual sense tagged corpora and machine translation, on the one hand; and to use parallel corpora and automatic sense tagging on the source text, on the other. With these resources, the problem of acquiring a WordNet from parallel corpora can be seen as a word alignment task. Fortunately, this task is well known, and some aligning algorithms are freely available.