Design and construction of a machine-tractable Japanese-Malay dictionary

• Main Authors: Bond, Francis, Ruhaida Sulong., Yamazaki, Takefumi., Ogura, Kentaro.
• Other Authors: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Linguistics::Sociolinguistics::Computational linguistics; DRNTU::Humanities::Language::Japanese
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/90875; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/6823
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

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.