Bilingual lexicon extraction from comparable corpora for closely related languages

Fišer, Darja (author), Ljubešić, Nikola (author)

In this paper we present a knowledge-light approach to extract a bilingual lexicon for closely related languages from comparable corpora. While in most related work an existing dictionary is used to translate context vectors, we take advantage of the similarities between languages instead and build a seed lexicon from words that are identical in both languages and then further extend it with context-based cognates and translations of the most frequent words. We also use cognates for reranking translation candidates obtained via context similarity and extract translation equivalents for all content words, not just nouns as in most related work. The results are very encouraging, suggesting that other similar languages could benefit from the same approach. By enlarging the seed lexicon with cognates and translations of the most frequent words and by cognate-based reranking of translation candidates we were able to improve the average baseline precision from 0.592 to 0.797 on themean reciprocal rank for the ten top-ranking translation candidates for nouns, verbs and adjectives with a 46% recall on the gold standard of 1000 random entries from a traditional dictionary.

• Language: English
• Keywords: korpusno jezikoslovje, spletni korpusi, sorodni jeziki, luščenje, leksikalna semantika, comparable corpora, web corpora, closely related languages, automatic bilingual lexicon extraction, lexical semantics
• Work type: Not categorized (r6)
• Tipology: 1.08 - Published Scientific Conference Contribution
• Organization: FF - Faculty of Arts
• Year: 2011
• Number of pages: [7 str.]
• UDC: 004.9:81'322
• COBISS.SI-ID: 46844258
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