Translation and extension of concepts across languages

Abstract

We present a method which, given a few words defining a concept in some language, retrieves, disambiguates and extends corresponding terms that define a similar concept in another specified language. This can be very useful for cross-lingual information retrieval and the preparation of multi-lingual lexical resources. We automatically obtain term translations from multilingual dictionaries and disambiguate them using web counts. We then retrieve web snippets with co-occurring translations, and discover additional concept terms from these snippets. Our term discovery is based on co-appearance of similar words in symmetric patterns. We evaluate our method on a set of language pairs involving 45 languages, including combinations of very dissimilar ones such as Russian, Chinese, and Hebrew for various concepts. We assess the quality of the retrieved sets using both human judgments and automatically comparing the obtained categories to corresponding English WordNet synsets. © 2009 Association for Computational Linguistics.