Building a Cross-lingual Relatedness Thesaurus using a Graph Similarity Measure

Lukas Michelbacher, Florian Laws, Beate Dorow, Ulrich Heid, Hinrich Schütze


Abstract
The Internet is an ever growing source of information stored in documents of different languages. Hence, cross-lingual resources are needed for more and more NLP applications. This paper presents (i) a graph-based method for creating one such resource and (ii) a resource created using the method, a cross-lingual relatedness thesaurus. Given a word in one language, the thesaurus suggests words in a second language that are semantically related. The method requires two monolingual corpora and a basic dictionary. Our general approach is to build two monolingual word graphs, with nodes representing words and edges representing linguistic relations between words. A bilingual dictionary containing basic vocabulary provides seed translations relating nodes from both graphs. We then use an inter-graph node-similarity algorithm to discover related words. Evaluation with three human judges revealed that 49% of the English and 57% of the German words discovered by our method are semantically related to the target words. We publish two resources in conjunction with this paper. First, noun coordinations extracted from the German and English Wikipedias. Second, the cross-lingual relatedness thesaurus which can be used in experiments involving interactive cross-lingual query expansion.
Anthology ID:
L10-1346
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
Month:
May
Year:
2010
Address:
Valletta, Malta
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Mike Rosner, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/499_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lukas Michelbacher, Florian Laws, Beate Dorow, Ulrich Heid, and Hinrich Schütze. 2010. Building a Cross-lingual Relatedness Thesaurus using a Graph Similarity Measure. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Building a Cross-lingual Relatedness Thesaurus using a Graph Similarity Measure (Michelbacher et al., LREC 2010)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/499_Paper.pdf