This paper addresses the problem of building conceptual resources for multilingual applications. We describe new techniques for large-scale construction of a semantic hierarchy for Chinese verbs, using thematic-role information to create links between Chinese concepts and English classes. We then present an approach to compensating for gaps in the existing resources. The resulting hierarchy is used for a multilingual lexicon for Chinese-English machine translation and cross-language information retrieval applications. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-2000-17) (Also cross-referemced as LAMP-TR-040)