Multipath Translation Lexicon Induction via Bridge Languages

This paper presents a method for inducing translation lexicons based on transduction models of cognate pairs via bridge languages. Bilingual lexicons within languages families are induced using probabilistic string edit distance models. Translation lexicons for arbitrary distant language pairs are then generated by a combination of these intra-family translation models and one or more cross-family on-line dictionaries. Up to 95% exact match accuracy is achieved on the target vocabulary (30-68% of inter-family test pairs). Thus substantial portions of translation lexicons can be generated accurately for languages where no bilingual dictionary or parallel corpora may exist.