A Cross-Lingual Pattern Retrieval Framework

We introduce a method for learning to grammatically categorize and organize the contexts of a given query. In our approach, grammatical descriptions, from general word groups to specific lexical phrases, are imposed on the query’s contexts aimed at accelerating lexicographers’ and language learners’ navigation through and GRASP upon the word usages. The method involves lemmatizing, part-of-speech tagging and shallowly parsing a general corpus and constructing its inverted files for monolingual queries, and word-aligning parallel texts and extracting and pruning translation equivalents for cross-lingual ones. At run-time, grammar-like patterns are generated, organized to form a thesaurus index structure on query words’ contexts, and presented to users along with their instantiations. Experimental results show that the extracted predominant patterns resemble phrases in grammar books and that the abstract-to-concrete context hierarchy of querying words effectively assists the process of language learning, especially in sentence translation or composition.