Bilingual Lexicon Generation Using Non-Aligned Signatures

Bilingual lexicons are fundamental resources. Modern automated lexicon generation methods usually require parallel corpora, which are not available for most language pairs. Lexicons can be generated using non-parallel corpora or a pivot language, but such lexicons are noisy. We present an algorithm for generating a high quality lexicon from a noisy one, which only requires an independent corpus for each language. Our algorithm introduces non-aligned signatures (NAS), a cross-lingual word context similarity score that avoids the over-constrained and inefficient nature of alignment-based methods. We use NAS to eliminate incorrect translations from the generated lexicon. We evaluate our method by improving the quality of noisy Spanish-Hebrew lexicons generated from two pivot English lexicons. Our algorithm substantially outperforms other lexicon generation methods.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Daphna Shezaf, Ari Rappoport
• Keywords: ACL 2010, Bilingual Lexicons, Computational Linguistics, Lexicon Generation Methods, Pivot English Lexicons