Overlapping Constraints of Two Step Selection to Generate a Transfer Dictionary

Any machine translation system requires a transfer dictionary between the source and target languages. Typically, since the construction of such a dictionary is done by hand, a lot of time is taken and the cost is enormous. Considering this, we attempted the construction of a bilingual dictionary through the re-generation of already-existing language resources. Aiming at the generation of a KoreanJapanese dictionary, we extracted candidates of Korean and Japanese equivalent pairs by a two-step process of searching through a Korean-English dictionary rst and then searching through an EnglishJapanese dictionary. We also attempted the narrowing down of Korean-Japanese equivalent pairs by the overlapping of obtained Japanese translations. According to a trial experiment using 100 Korean words randomly taken, 61 correct Japanese translations were obtained. Among the correct translations, we took 25 translations for which a search of the English-Japanese dictionary successfully produced two or more translations for the English words obtained in the search results of the Korean-English dictionary. Of the 25 translations, 21 (84%) could be automatically narrowed down by taking the overlapped words from the Japanese translation sets for the individual English words. With the above twostep dictionary extraction, moreover, nine cases out of ten were correct when only one Japanese translation was obtained. These results show the possibility that Korean-Japanese translation pairs can be generated at an expected correctness rate of 44 out of 100 words when using the already proposed method that combines a Korean-English dictionary and a Japanese-English dictionary.