Automatically Generated Online Dictionaries

The aim of our software presentation is to demonstrate that corpus-driven bilingual dictionaries generated fully by automatic means are suitable for human use. Need for such dictionaries shows up specifically in the case of lesser used languages where due to the low demand it does not pay off for publishers to invest into the production of dictionaries. Previous experiments have proven that bilingual lexicons can be created by applying word alignment on parallel corpora. Such an approach, especially the corpus-driven nature of it, yields several advantages over more traditional approaches. Most importantly, automatically attained translation probabilities are able to guarantee that the most frequently used translations come first within an entry. However, the proposed technique have to face some difficulties, as well. In particular, the scarce availability of parallel texts for medium density languages imposes limitations on the size of the resulting dictionary. Our objective is to design and implement a dictionary building workflow and a query system that is apt to exploit the additional benefits of the method and overcome the disadvantages of it.