Acquisition of Translation Lexicons for Historically Unwritten Languages via Bridging Loanwords

Michael Bloodgood, Benjamin Strauss


Abstract
With the advent of informal electronic communications such as social media, colloquial languages that were historically unwritten are being written for the first time in heavily code-switched environments. We present a method for inducing portions of translation lexicons through the use of expert knowledge in these settings where there are approximately zero resources available other than a language informant, potentially not even large amounts of monolingual data. We investigate inducing a Moroccan Darija-English translation lexicon via French loanwords bridging into English and find that a useful lexicon is induced for human-assisted translation and statistical machine translation.
Anthology ID:
W17-2504
Volume:
Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora
Month:
August
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Serge Sharoff, Pierre Zweigenbaum, Reinhard Rapp
Venue:
BUCC
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
21–25
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-2504
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-2504
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Michael Bloodgood and Benjamin Strauss. 2017. Acquisition of Translation Lexicons for Historically Unwritten Languages via Bridging Loanwords. In Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora, pages 21–25, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Acquisition of Translation Lexicons for Historically Unwritten Languages via Bridging Loanwords (Bloodgood & Strauss, BUCC 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-2504.pdf
Presentation:
 W17-2504.Presentation.pdf