A Methodology for Bilingual Lexicon Extraction from Comparable Corpora

Abstract

Dictionary extraction using parallel corpora is well established. However, for many language pairs parallel corpora are a scarce resource which is why in the current work we discuss methods for dictionary extraction from comparable corpora. Hereby the aim is to push the boundaries of current approaches, which typically utilize correlations between co-occurrence patterns across languages, in several ways: 1) Eliminating the need for initial lexicons by using a bootstrapping approach which only requires a few seed translations. 2) Implementing a new approach which first establishes alignments between comparable documents across languages, and then computes cross-lingual alignments between words and multiword-units. 3) Improving the quality of computed word translations by applying an interlingua approach, which, by relying on several pivot languages, allows an effective multi-dimensional cross-check. 4) We investigate that, by looking at foreign citations, language translations can even be derived from a single monolingual text corpus.