Automatically generating bilingual dictionaries from parallel, manually translated texts is a well established technique that works well in practice. However, parallel texts are a scarce resource. Therefore, it is desirable also to be able to generate dictionaries from pairs of comparable monolingual corpora. For most languages, such corpora are much easier to acquire, and often in considerably...

We describe a morphological analyzer for the Swahili language, written in an extension of XFST/LEXC intended for the easy declaration of morphophonological patterns and importation of lexical resources. Our analyzer was supplemented extensively with data from the Kamusi Project (kamusi.org), a user-contributed multilingual dictionary. Making use of this resource allowed us to achieve wide lexic...

This articles presents a bilingual question answering system, which is able to process questions in French and to find the answer in documents in English (or eventually the other way around). Two cross-langual strategies are described and evaluated, which concern at least the information retrieval steps, but can also be used by the answer extraction module. First, we study the contribution of b...

Persian is an Indo-European language written using Arabic script, and is an official language of Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. Transliteration of Persian to English—that is, the character-bycharacter mapping of a Persian word that is not readily available in a bilingual dictionary—is an unstudied problem. In this paper we make three novel contributions. First, we present performance compar...

Many existing methods for bilingual lexicon learning from comparable corpora are based on similarity of context vectors. These methods suffer from noisy vectors that greatly affect their accuracy. We introduce a method for filtering this noise allowing highly accurate learning of bilingual lexicons. Our method is based on the notion of in-domain terms which can be thought of as the most importa...

This paper describes a new approach to word sense disambiguation (WSD) based on automatically acquired "word sense division. The semantically related sense entries in a bilingual dictionary are arranged in clusters using a heuristic labeling algorithm to provide a more complete and appropriate sense division for WSD. Multiple translations of senses serve as outside information for automatic tag...

We develop a new objective function for word alignment that measures the size of the bilingual dictionary induced by an alignment. A word alignment that results in a small dictionary is preferred over one that results in a large dictionary. In order to search for the alignment that minimizes this objective, we cast the problem as an integer linear program. We then extend our objective function ...

Word alignment in bilingual corpora has been an active research topic in the Machine Translation research groups. In this paper, we describe an alignment system that aligns English-Myanmar texts at word level in parallel sentences. Essential for building parallel corpora is the alignment of translated segments with source segments. Since word alignment research on Myanmar and English languages ...

We launched a 5-year-project in 2006 to develop a Japanese-Chinese machine translation system for translating scientific and technical papers. As part of that project, we are currently building a Japanese-Chinese translation dictionary based on the EDR Japanese-English bilingual dictionary. This paper presents the design and construction of the Japanese-Chinese translation dictionary, including...

Information on subcategorization and selectional restrictions is important for natural language processing tasks such as deep parsing, rule-based machine translation and automatic summarization. In this paper we present a method of adding detailed entries to a bilingual dictionary, based on information in an existing valency dictionary. The method is based on two assumptions: words with similar...