Building Bilingual Lexicons using Lexical Translation Probabilities via Pivot Languages

This paper proposes a method of increasing the size of a bilingual lexicon obtained from two other bilingual lexicons via a pivot language. When we apply this approach, there are two main challenges, “ambiguity” and “mismatch” of terms; we target the latter problem by improving the utilization ratio of the bilingual lexicons. Given two bilingual lexicons between language pairs Lf-Lp and Lp-Le, we compute lexical translation probabilities of word pairs by using a statistical word-alignment model, and term decomposition/composition techniques. We compare three approaches to generate the bilingual lexicon: “exact merging”, “word-based merging”, and our proposed “alignment-based merging”. In our method, we combine lexical translation probabilities and a simple language model for estimating the probabilities of translation pairs. The experimental results show that our method could drastically improve the number of translation terms compared to the two methods mentioned above. Additionally, we evaluated and discussed the quality of the translation outputs.