Bilingual Lexicon Induction: Effortless Evaluation of Word Alignment Tools and Production of Resources for Improbable Language Pairs

Adrien Lardilleux (1) , Julien Gosme (2) , Yves Lepage (2)

1 GREYC - Groupe de Recherche en Informatique, Image et Instrumentation de Caen
2 Equipe Hultech - Laboratoire GREYC - UMR6072

In this paper, we present a simple protocol to evaluate word aligners on bilingual lexicon induction tasks from parallel corpora. Rather than resorting to gold standards, it relies on a comparison of the outputs of word aligners against a reference bilingual lexicon. The quality of this reference bilingual lexicon does not need to be particularly high, because evaluation quality is ensured by systematically filtering this reference lexicon with the parallel corpus the word aligners are trained on. We perform a comparison of three freely available word aligners on numerous language pairs from the Bible parallel corpus (Resnik et al., 1999): MGIZA++ (Gao and Vogel, 2008), BerkeleyAligner (Liang et al., 2006), and Anymalign (Lardilleux and Lepage, 2009). We then select the most appropriate one to produce bilingual lexicons for all language pairs of this corpus. These involve Cebuano, Chinese, Danish, English, Finnish, French, Greek, Indonesian, Latin, Spanish, Swedish, and Vietnamese. The 66 resulting lexicons are made freely available.

Domaines: Traitement du texte et du document; Informatique et langage [cs.CL]

Adrien Lardilleux, Julien Gosme, Yves Lepage. Bilingual Lexicon Induction: Effortless Evaluation of Word Alignment Tools and Production of Resources for Improbable Language Pairs. The Seventh conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), May 2010, Valletta, Malta. pp.252-256. ⟨hal-00488768⟩