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Parallel Corpora for Contrastive and Translation Studies: New resources and applications
Edited by Irene Doval and M. Teresa Sánchez Nieto
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 90] 2019
► pp. 251–265

Strategies for building high quality bilingual lexicons from comparable corpora

| University of Santiago de Compostela

This chapter outlines two strategies to automatically build bilingual dictionaries: One is based on the use of a pivot language and existing bilingual dictionaries, while the other relies on string similarity and cognate extraction. Both strategies have in common the use of translation equivalents extracted from comparable corpora to filter out odd bilingual pairs and validate the correct ones. The correctness of the entries validated with comparable corpora is very high, close to that achieved by using parallel corpora. The chapter reports several case studies describing how to build new high-quality bilingual lexicons, namely English-Galician, English-Portuguese, and Portuguese-Spanish dictionaries with more than 90% precision. This outperforms state-of-the-art systems on bilingual extraction from comparable corpora, whose best scores hardly reach 70 or 80%.

Keywords: comparable corpora, extraction of translation candidates, bilingual lexicons, distributional similarity, cognates
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Pruning lexicons built through transitiviy
    • 2.1Basic assumptions
    • 2.2The pruning method
  • 3.Pruning bilingual cognates
    • 3.1Basic assumptions
    • 3.2The pruning method
  • 4.Experiments
    • 4.1Derivation by transitivity
    • 4.2Comparable corpora
      • 4.2.1Validation
      • 4.2.2Evaluation of the dictionaries generated by transitivity
    • 4.3Bilingual cognates
      • 4.3.1Existing resources
      • 4.3.2Size of the extracted lexicons
      • 4.3.3Evaluation of the cognate-based extraction
      • 4.3.4Error analysis
  • 5.Conclusions and future work
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 20 March 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.90.15gam
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Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Garcia, Marcos, Marcos García-Salido & Margarita Alonso-Ramos
2019. Discovering bilingual collocations in parallel corpora. In Parallel Corpora for Contrastive and Translation Studies [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 90], ► pp. 267 ff. DOI logo
Mikhailov, Mikhail
2021. Mind the Source Data! Translation Equivalents and Translation Stimuli from Parallel Corpora. In New Perspectives on Corpus Translation Studies [New Frontiers in Translation Studies, ], ► pp. 259 ff. DOI logo

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