In this paper we consider the linking procedure of Russian wordnet (RuWordNet) to Wordnet. The specificity of the procedure in our case is based on the fact that a lot of bilingual (Russian and English) lexical data have been gathered in another Russian thesaurus RuThes, which has a different structure than WordNet. Previously, RuThes has been semi-automatically transformed into RuWordNet, having the WordNet-like structure. Now, the RuThes English data are utilized to establish matching from the RuWordNet synsets to the WordNet synsets.

In this paper we show that if we want to obtain human evidence about conventionalization of some phrases, we should ask native speakers about associations they have to a given phrase and its component words. We have shown that if component words of a phrase have each other as frequent associations, then this phrase can be considered as conventionalized. Another type of conventionalized phrases can be revealed using two factors: low entropy of phrase associations and low intersection of component word and phrase associations. The association experiments were performed for the Russian language.