Lexicon+TX: rapid construction of a multilingual lexicon with under-resourced languages

Lian Tze Lim, Lay Ki Soon, Tek Yong Lim, Enya Kong Tang, Bali Ranaivo-Malançon

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleResearchpeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

Most efforts at automatically creating multilingual lexicons require input lexical resources with rich content (e.g. semantic networks, domain codes, semantic categories) or large corpora. Such material is often unavailable and difficult to construct for under-resourced languages. In some cases, particularly for some ethnic languages, even unannotated corpora are still in the process of collection. We show how multilingual lexicons with under-resourced languages can be constructed using simple bilingual translation lists, which are more readily available. The prototype multilingual lexicon developed comprise six member languages: English, Malay, Chinese, French, Thai and Iban, the last of which is an under-resourced language in Borneo. Quick evaluations showed that 91.2  % of 500 random multilingual entries in the generated lexicon require minimal or no human correction.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)479-492
Number of pages14
JournalLanguage Resources and Evaluation
Volume48
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Sep 2014
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Iban
  • Malay
  • Multilingual lexicon
  • Under-resourced languages

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