Takayoshi Koyama
2025
Media of Langue: Exploring Word Translation Network
Goki Muramoto
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Atsuki Sato
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Takayoshi Koyama
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
In the human activity of word translation, two languages face each other, mutually searching their own language system for the semantic place of words in the other language. We discover the huge network formed by the chain of these mutual translations as *Word Translation Network*, a network where words are nodes, and translation volume is represented as edges, and propose *Word Translation Map*, a novel interface for exploring this network. *Word Translation Map* points to the semantic configurations of many words in multiple languages at once, containing the information of existing dictionaries such as bilingual and synonym dictionaries. We have also implemented and published this interface as a web application, focusing on seven language pairs. This paper first defines the *Word Translation Network* and describes how to actually construct the network from bilingual corpora, followed by an analysis of the properties of the network. Next, we explain how to design a *Word Translation Map* using this network, and finally, we analyze the features of the *Word Translation Map* as a dictionary. The web application is publicly accessible at www.media-of-langue.org.