Converting a bilingual dictionary into a bilingual knowledge bank based on the synchronous SSTC

Converting a Bilingual Dictionary into a Bilingual Knowledge Bank based on the Synchronous SSTC Tang Enya Kong, Mosleh H. Al-Adhaileh Computer Aided Translation Unit School of Computer Sciences Universiti Sains Malaysia 11800 PENANG, MALAYSIA {enyakong, mosleh}@cs.usm.my Abstract In this paper, we would like to present an approach to construct a huge Bilingual Knowledge Bank (BKB) from an English Malay bilingual dictionary based on the idea of synchronous Structured String-Tree Correspondence (SSTC). The SSTC is a general structure that can associate an arbitrary tree structure to string in a language as desired by the annotator to be the interpretation structure of the string, and more importantly is the facility to specify the correspondence between the string and the associated tree which can be non- projective. With this structure, we are able to match linguistic units at different inter levels of the structure (i.e. define the correspondence between substrings in the sentence, nodes in the tree, subtrees in the tree and sub-correspondences in the SSTC). This flexibility makes synchronous SSTC very well suited for the construction of a Bilingual Knowledge Bank we need for the English- Malay MT application. Keywords Structured String-Tree Correspondence (SSTC), Synchronous SSTC, Bilingual Knowledge Bank (BKB), EBMT. Introduction Recently, much effort was devoted to the compilation of the bilingual corpora for the purpose of machine translation. There is a strong argument that a bilingual corpus, when appropriately structured, can largely replace conventional dictionaries and grammar rules in machine translation. With this objective in mind, we propose, in this paper, an approach to construct a Bilingual Knowledge Bank (BKB) from a bilingual corpora consisting of translation pairs extracted from a given bilingual dictionary. In our approach, we introduce a flexible annotation schema called synchronous Structured String-Tree Correspondence (SSTC), which will be used as the basic structure to annotate translation pairs in the bilingual knowledge bank. The SSTC is a general structure that can associate an arbitrary tree structure to string in a language as desired by the annotator to be the interpretation structure of the string, and more importantly is the facility to specify the correspondence between the string and the associated tree which can be non-projective (Boitet & Zaharin, 1988). The flexibility in the mapping from source to target languages, using synchronous SSTC, makes possible to state direct correspondences without a mediating interlingual representation. By doing this, we are able to match linguistic units at different inter levels of the structure (i.e. define the correspondence between substrings in the sentence, nodes in the tree, subtrees in the tree and sub-correspondences in the SSTC). This flexibility makes synchronous SSTC very well suited for the construction of a Bilingual Knowledge Bank we need for the English-Malay MT application. In this paper, we will propose an approach to construct a huge BKB by incorporating some of the existing tools in the annotation process. First, word alignment tools that have been proven their efficiency on other pairs of languages such as Melamed (1997; 1999; 2000) will be adapted to perform English-Malay word …

Content truncated to 500 words