We propose a robust method of automatically constructing a bilingual word sense dictionary from readily available monolingual ontologies by using estimation-maximization, without any annotated training data or manual tuning. We demonstrate our method on the English FrameNet and Chinese HowNet structures. Owing to the robustness of EM iterations in improving translation likelihoods, our word sense translation accuracies are very high, at 82% on average, for the 11 most ambiguous words in the English FrameNet with 5 senses or more
