Minimally Supervised Multilingual Taxonomy and Translation Lexicon Induction
Nikesh Garera, David Yarowsky · 2008
We present a novel algorithm for the acqui-sition of multilingual lexical taxonomies (in-cluding hyponymy/hypernymy, meronymy and taxonomic cousinhood), from monolin-gual corpora with minimal supervision in the form of seed exemplars using discriminative learning across the major WordNet seman-tic relationships. This capability is also ex-tended robustly and effectively to a second language (Hindi) via cross-language projec-tion of the various seed exemplars. We also present a novel model of translation dic-tionary induction via multilingual transitive models of hypernymy and hyponymy, us-ing these induced taxonomies. Candidate lexical translation probabilities are based on the probability that their induced hyponyms and/or hypernyms are translations of one an-other. We evaluate all of the above models on English and Hindi. 1