Linking English Words in Two Bilingual Dictionaries to Generate Another Language Pair Dictionary

In developing a machine translation system, one of the di cult tasks is how to build a transfer dictionary. It has been built by human labor from scratch in most cases. This approach, however, is very ine ective from the viewpoint of cost and time. To avoid this problem, we generate a Korean to Japanese dictionary as a sample, taking advantage of existing linguistic resources, which consist of a Japanese to English dictionary and a Korean to English dictionary for the present goal. First, we extract some sets of English words corresponding to Korean words from a Korean to English dictionary. Second, we search for Japanese words having English equivalents that are similar to Korean counterparts in meaning. Finally, we link the Korean words to Japanese ones. The degree of similarity is determined according to how many translated words are shared between Korean and Japanese. We test 1,000 Korean words extracted at random and get 365 appropriate Japanese words. The result shows that 72% are accurate for a degree of similarity of 0.8 and above.