Building a Basque-Chinese Dictionary by Using English as Pivot

Xabier Saralegi, Iker Manterola, Iñaki San Vicente


Abstract
Bilingual dictionaries are key resources in several fields such as translation, language learning or various NLP tasks. However, only major languages have such resources. Automatically built dictionaries by using pivot languages could be a useful resource in these circumstances. Pivot-based bilingual dictionary building is based on merging two bilingual dictionaries which share a common language (e.g. LA-LB, LB-LC) in order to create a dictionary for a new language pair (e.g LA-LC). This process may include wrong translations due to the polisemy of words. We built Basque-Chinese (Mandarin) dictionaries automatically from Basque-English and Chinese-English dictionaries. In order to prune wrong translations we used different methods adequate for less resourced languages. Inverse Consultation and Distributional Similarity methods are used because they just depend on easily available resources. Finally, we evaluated manually the quality of the built dictionaries and the adequacy of the methods. Both Inverse Consultation and Distributional Similarity provide good precision of translations but recall is seriously damaged. Distributional similarity prunes rare translations more accurately than other methods.
Anthology ID:
L12-1006
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Mehmet Uğur Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
1443–1447
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/114_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xabier Saralegi, Iker Manterola, and Iñaki San Vicente. 2012. Building a Basque-Chinese Dictionary by Using English as Pivot. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 1443–1447, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Building a Basque-Chinese Dictionary by Using English as Pivot (Saralegi et al., LREC 2012)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/114_Paper.pdf