Abstract
Thesauri and controlled vocabularies facilitate access to digital collections by explicitly representing the underlying principles of organization. Translation of such resources into multiple languages is an important component for providing multilingual access. However, the specificity of vocabulary terms in most thesauri precludes fully-automatic translation using general-domain lexical resources. In this paper, we present an efficient process for leveraging human translations to construct domain-specific lexical resources. This process is illustrated on a thesaurus of 56,000 concepts used to catalog a large archive of oral histories. We elicited human translations on a small subset of concepts, induced a probabilistic phrase dictionary from these translations, and used the resulting resource to automatically translate the rest of the thesaurus. Two separate evaluations demonstrate the acceptability of the automatic translations and the cost-effectiveness of our approach.
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Notes
Even after a term is assumed to be translated, there will be keyword phrases containing that term which contain other high translation value terms not yet translated. In some cases, the sum of the translation value of the untranslated terms will be high enough to warrant addition of the keyword phrase to the prioritized list, despite the already translated term.
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Acknowledgements
Our thanks to Doug Oard for helpful discussions; to our Czech informants; and to Soumya Bhat for her programming efforts. This work was supported in part by NSF IIS Award 0122466 and NSF CISE RI Award EIA0130422. Additional support also came from grants of the MSMT CR #1P05ME786, #LC536 and #MSM0021620838, and the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic #GA405/06/0589. The first author would like to thank Esther and Kiri for their kind support.
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Lin, J., Murray, G.C., Dorr, B.J. et al. A cost-effective lexical acquisition process for large-scale thesaurus translation. Lang Resources & Evaluation 43, 27–40 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-008-9074-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-008-9074-8