Exploiting aggregate properties of bilingual dictionaries for distinguishing senses of English words and inducing English sense clusters
Charles Schafer, David Yarowsky · 2004
We propose a novel method for inducing monolingual semantic hierarchies and sense clusters from numerous foreign-language-to-English bilingual dictionaries. The method exploits patterns of non-transitivity in translations across multiple languages. No complex or hierarchical structure is assumed or used in the input dictionaries: each is initially parsed into the "lowest common denominator" form, which is to say, a list of pairs of the form (foreign word, English word). We then propose a monolingual synonymy measure derived from this aggregate resource, which is used to derive multilingually-motivated sense hierarchies for monolingual English words, with potential applications in word sense classification, lexicography and statistical machine translation.