Design and Construction of a machinetractable MalayEnglish Lexicon.pdfVIP

Design and Construction of a machine-tractable Japanese-Malay Dictionary Francis Bond, Ruhaida Binti Sulong, Takefumi Yamazaki and Kentaro Ogura * NTT Communication Science Laboratories bond, ogura@cslab.kecl.ntt.co.jp NTT MSC ruhaida@.my NTT Cyber Space Laboratories yamazaki@nttnly.isl.ntt.co.jp Abstract We present a method for combining two bilingual dictionaries to make a third, using one language as a pivot. In this case we combine a Japanese-English dictionary with a Malay-English dictionary, to produce a Japanese-Malay dictionary suitable for use in a machine translation system. Our method differs from previous methods in its use of semantic classes to rank translation equivalents: word pairs with compatible semantic classes are preferred to those with dissimilar classes. We also experiment with the use of two pivot languages. We have made a prototype dictionary of over 75,000 pairs. Keywords bilingual lexicon, lexicon construction, machine translation, Japanese, Malay 1 Introduction rect semantic classes marked. Finer grained variations, such as the difference between We present a method for combining two bilingual dictio- doves and pig eons (both  hato in Japanese) are harder to naries to make a third, using one language as a pivot. The distinguish using semantic classes. Instead, collocation and aim of our research is to create a dictionary to be used usage information is necessary. Various methods exist to in the machine translati