Analyzing Methods for Improving Precision of Pivot Based Bilingual Dictionaries

Abstract

An A-C bilingual dictionary can be inferred by merging A-B and B-C dictionaries using B as pivot. However, polysemous pivot words often produce wrong translation candidates. This paper analyzes two methods for pruning wrong candidates: one based on exploiting the structure of the source dictionaries, and the other based on distributional similarity computed from comparable corpora. As both methods depend exclusively on easily available resources, they are well suited to less resourced languages. We studied whether these two techniques complement each other given that they are based on different paradigms. We also researched combining them by looking for the best adequacy depending on various application scenarios. 1