Constraint-Based Bilingual Lexicon Induction for Closely Related Languages

Abstract

The lack or absence of parallel and comparable corpora makes bilingual lexicon extraction becomes a difficult task for low-resource languages. Pivot language and cognate recognition approach have been proven useful to induce bilingual lexicons for such languages. We analyze the features of closely related languages and define a semantic constraint assumption. Based on the assumption, we propose a constraint-based bilingual lexicon induction for closely related languages by extending constraints and translation pair candidates from recent pivot language approach. We further define three constraint sets based on language characteristics. In this paper, two controlled experiments are conducted. The former involves four closely related language pairs with different language pair similarities, and the latter focuses on sense connectivity between non-pivot words and pivot words. We evaluate our result with F-measure. The result indicates that our method works better on voluminous input dictionaries and high similarity languages. Finally, we introduce a strategy to use proper constraint sets for different goals and language characteristics.

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